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The blood-slave continued to hover in the doorway, trembling like a field mouse. Afraid to be in the presence of anyone who might draw The Master’s ire, afraid too that when the audience was done, she’d be the one called to The Master’s bed and bled dry.
Sajia offered no reassurance. Anything she said in an effort to comfort the girl would be a lie.
She stripped the damp nightgown from her body, tossing it onto the bed and dressing quickly. Supple black pants molded to her legs. A sleeveless shirt in swirling earth tones of yellow and brown and green left her arms bare, revealing the marks carved into her upper arm, pale, freshly healed symbols identifying her position and indicating she served the Tucci family.
She pulled soft, short boots on last, and the blood-slave turned without a word, scurrying down the hallway as if wanting to put as much distance as possible between her fate and Sajia’s.
Sajia followed. Despite the worry for Corinne that tied her stomach in knots, her steps sounded confident against the tile floor. Her footfalls echoed off the unadorned walls, their stark white surfaces a reminder of a servant’s place where the rest of the estate was lavishly decorated. A manifestation of power and wealth, though compared to the Tassone and many of the other vampire families, the Tucci were paupers.
The moment Sajia passed from the servants’ living area, two vampires positioned themselves behind her, trailing her to The Master’s parlor like deadly shadows.
Additional vampires waited outside that room. And more inside, a mix of inner-circle guards and family members.
No one spoke. No one moved. Yet Sajia felt their presence against her skin in a frigid blast, like a grave opened to reveal icy horror.
The Master sat behind his desk, caught forever at the age of thirty-five, his pockmarked face a testament to a time when vaccines didn’t exist and bleeding by leeches was a common treatment.
Whatever name he’d gone by then, at his death and rebirth he’d shed it like a snake does its skin. What the vampires called him privately, beyond Sire, she didn’t know. The humans knew only one word for him. Master.
Even fearing something had happened to Corinne, Sajia didn’t blurt out a question. She bowed her head and waited for The Master to speak first, forced any hint of rebe
llion deep inside herself at the required subservience.
She knew her place. It was well defined in a world forever changed by a long-ago war that decimated human populations and crushed nations, then was thrust into years of violent anarchy after the supernaturals made their existence known.
Peace, of a sort, had finally come with the carving up of territories. In San Francisco, vampires ruled. Absolutely.
They were apex predators. And humans, little more than cattle to be counted by the head instead of as individuals.
And I am one of those cattle, Sajia told herself, resisting the urge to touch the small gold scorpion at the base of her throat—a talisman and the only thing she possessed that belonged to parents she had no memory of, a reminder that she’d chosen to remain in servitude rather than leave San Francisco. No human beyond their childhood was allowed to live in the city unless they were found to be useful to the vampires. She didn’t want to move away from the aunt and uncle who’d raised her after her mother and father perished in a fire in the San Joaquin, or from the cousins who were like brothers and sisters.
Becoming bajaran, confidant to the still-human scion of a vampire family, not only allowed her to remain in San Francisco but also put her in a position to intercede on behalf of her own family if they needed help. It came with significant risks to them and to her, though even from the start it had been more than a role taken for benefit.
She’d liked Corinne from the moment they met by chance on the pier, and had come to worry for her future. But then that was the point of providing scions with bajaran, so there would be a trusted human in place should they survive their transition to vampire.
Finally The Master broke the silence, perhaps convinced she harbored no guilt, since she hadn’t gone to her knees and confessed in an effort to save herself. “Did Corinne tell you arrangements have been finalized for her to be sent to Los Angeles?”
An ache seized Sajia with the thought of being torn from her family. “No, she didn’t tell me.”
“She is to produce children with a Gairden scion.”
Fear on Corinne’s behalf tightened the knot of worry in Sajia’s belly. The Tucci blood was weak, though it would be suicide for her to speak those words out loud.
Not all families produced readily viable scions, genetically related children who would survive their transition. The Master decided when it was time to attempt it. Corinne’s biological mother and father both died in their transition, as did two older brothers and a couple of cousins.
Given that there were other still-human scions of the Tucci family and that The Master valued male children far more than he valued female ones, it was easy to imagine the worst, that the Gairden blood was so much weaker that they’d paid well to infuse their line with Tucci blood.
Sajia kept her head bowed, knowing there had to be more or she wouldn’t be standing before The Master in a roomful of vampires.
“Corinne has a boyfriend? A lover?”
Caution fanned into existence. “I don’t know of one.”
She suspected a budding romance. Corinne was at the age to dream of love and a future of her own making rather than accepting the reality of a fate orchestrated for her by The Master.
Let her have this time, Sajia had thought, not pushing for answers these past weeks, and now barely suppressing a shiver at how quickly secrets could turn deadly.
Being bajaran meant walking a fine line between loyalty to the individual and loyalty to the family. Betrayal meant death. Or worse. And with vampires, there were so many things worse than death.
