Chapter 2 Who’s the Mole?

Nomon's POV

Somewhere on the North American continent lies a secret town called Sangreal — a farm where we vampires breed humans, closed to ordinary people. In our language, Sangreal means “feast.”

I looked at the calendar beside the stained-glass window. It read 2000. So this place already had two thousand years of history behind it — about as long as I had been alive.

I lived in the old castle. From the balcony I could look down over the red-brick town of Sangreal in the distance. Hard to believe that in only five hundred years the place could have changed this much — changed enough to be irritating.

“Hey, Nomon. Aren’t you curious? About that thing the livestock put together… the Sanctuary?”

My old friend Nick was busy with a freshly dead farm animal. He tore the battle coat off the carcass, drove his hardened talons straight into the solid chest, and with one hard yank ripped out a heart still strung with veins, still beating.

The reek of blood burst open. A warm drop of it spattered onto my neck. I pulled out a handkerchief at once and wiped the mark away, clean. Then I reached into the liquor cabinet, took out a glass, and tossed it to him.

“The Sanctuary has only existed five hundred years,” Nick said, catching the glass, crushing the heart one-handed and squeezing the blood into it, then gulping it down. “And it can stand against us? How is that possible? I say there’s a mole in Sangreal.”

“A mole?” I raised an eyebrow.

A trickle of blood slid along the edge of the table and dripped onto the floor. My brow knotted instantly. I snatched up a rag and wiped the streak away, then set the corpse back in the exact center of the long table, where it belonged.

“Those silver pistols that can kill vampires — no way they came out of these livestock’s pig brains,” Nick said.

I reached for his empty glass, and my fingers stopped dead in midair.

“What is it?” he asked.

“That thing is called a Sanctified Firearm,” I said.

Then I looked down at the floor in disgust — Nick’s blood-soaked leather shoes were tramping across my clean marble, leaving a trail of vivid red prints. I picked up the mop and followed behind him: every step he took, I wiped a print off his heels.

Honestly, I wanted to pull those shoes off him right now and throw the damn things into the incinerator.

“And the bullets, those are Sanctium Bullets, right? God knows what hellish ingredients are in them — enough to badly wound an Origin.” Nick finally stopped walking, and the road of blood running the length of the banquet hall stopped spreading.

I stared at those shoes, finally still, and breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

“Want to try?” I asked.

“Try what?”

I tilted my head toward the corpse on the long table. The battle coat belonged to a vampire hunter of the Sanctuary.

“He was a hunter.” I leaned in, felt around the dead man’s waist, and drew out a silver-plated revolver, its barrel engraved with a fine white lily.

“God! This is it! This thing has been killing us for five hundred years!” Nick reached out eagerly to snatch it.

I stepped back half a pace and neatly avoided his claws. “You don’t know how to use it. Watch. I’ll teach you.”

I held the gun suspended between the two of us. My thumb hooked the hammer and drew it back in slow motion — click. The cylinder gave two crisp metallic turns and locked hard onto the firing pin.

Nick leaned in, studying it closely, frowning. “That’s just how you use any ordinary pistol. How could it—”

His voice went cold all at once. When he raised his head, his eyes had already been dyed scarlet with murder.

He stared at me, teeth clenched. “Fuck… Nomon. You’re the mole.”

The muzzle was already pressed hard against Nick’s heart.

“Take a bullet and you’ll understand its ingredients for yourself.” I pulled the trigger.

Bang! The bullet punched straight through his chest and burst into a spray of blood.

“I’m sorry, Nick.” I looked down at the body. “I need an Origin’s heart, and I was one short. Besides, you dirtied my floor.”

“Call it your cleaning fee.”

When Nick fell dead, blood was everywhere, reddening the emblem on the marble — an R coiled round with a serpent — and some of it soaked in deep, past wiping.

Fifty years on, that faint bloodstain is still there. And now a creature in a pair of ankle boots is walking back and forth across it.

In her hand is a glass — the one Nick left behind when he died, its walls still carrying a dark red smear fifty years old. I never wiped it. I, who can’t stand the slightest mess, have miraculously kept it.

Until today. Until this day in 2050, when the female creature called Alaina digs the glass out from deep in a cabinet and, rag in hand, gets ready to wipe that stain away.

That is not a good sign: female + relic = ?

I stand on the balcony, watching Alaina’s back with cold eyes.

By livestock standards she is at best a scrawny milk cow. The one thing better than a milk cow: she has long black hair, like my favorite black coffee, and a name that doesn’t sound like livestock — Alaina.

Two thousand years alive, and I have left the shape of “Nomon” on far too many women. So many that I long ago lost all interest in sex.

I don’t know why she was sent in.

I draw a contract from my coat, made of concentrated blood plasma, giving off a faintly sweet smell of blood rust, stamped with the lacquer seal of the Sanctuary.

The Sanctuary and I have always kept up a certain tacit trade.

The words on it are carved with a silver knife. We agreed: the Sanctuary supplies me with blood, delivering blood packs on schedule. And I made it perfectly clear in the notes — no female blood packs.

The Sanctuary has always obediently sent male blood packs.

This time they broke the agreement and sent a female.

In the fourteen days since she came to the castle, I haven’t touched her — not her blood, not her body.

I’m not interested in her. But the Sanctuary’s breach of contract puzzles me.

Then she digs out Nick’s glass and is about to wipe off that old stain, and something in me gives a faint tug.

“Alaina. Come here.”

That stops the rag in her hand.

I lean back in the rocking chair and watch her turn around. She’s doing her best to look unafraid, the fool.

She doesn’t know that vampire hearing is unnaturally sharp. Every step she takes toward me, an almost imperceptible metallic scraping comes from inside her boots.

Every step she takes, her heavy heartbeat thuds loud enough to irritate me.

Damn.

I really want to cut her heart out right now, so it stops beating!

Damn it, now I’m thinking about Nick again. Cutting out a heart would dirty the marble. No. Absolutely not.

Biting the neck artery would spray blood everywhere too. Filthy.

“Your wrist,” I say.

It’s the first time I’ve fed from a wrist. The vessels there are thin; you can feed cleanly, without fouling a single tile I’ve scrubbed.

Not bad.

The moment my fangs pierce her skin, her blood coils around my tongue like something alive. The taste freezes every feature on my face.

It’s as if countless ants are crawling down my throat.

Blood is a liquid. It should not have that texture — like it has legs, like it is crawling madly.

I’ve drunk countless bloods. This blood is not normal.

I bite into her wrist and slant a glance at her. There is no confusion in her eyes at all. Instead she has the nerve to stare straight back at me.

Interesting. This strange blood, and this woman…

Dumbass. What was I just thinking? I called her a “woman”? On the strength of those eyes alone, I carelessly took a farm animal for a human.

And the equation I couldn’t solve suddenly clicks:

Woman + relic = an exquisitely designed trap.