Chapter 202 The Handsome Stranger
POV: Dante | London, Rookeries approach
I find London the way I find everything, which is by following a thread until it runs out and then finding the next thread, and the thread that led me here started in Rome eight months ago when a contact in the Vatican's supernatural registry mentioned, in passing, that a dhampir named Valentina Corvino had been flagged in the British Parliament's watch list.
Which was impossible, because Valentina Corvino died six years ago in a facility fire outside Palermo that I attended the aftermath of and which I have been living with the specific weight of ever since.
So either my contact was wrong, which he has never been in the fourteen years I have worked with him, or the fire was not what it appeared to be, which means six years of grief has been sitting on top of a lie, which is a different kind of weight entirely.
I am twenty-five years old and I have been a vampire hunter since I was sixteen, trained by the same network that trained Valentina before me, and I travel light and I travel fast and I arrived in London three days ago and spent those three days following the thread from the Parliament watch list to the Rookeries, which is the part of London where the supernatural underground operates in the specific way that underground communities operate, which is loudly to each other and completely invisibly to anyone outside.
The Rookeries has the quality of a place that has been through something and knows it. The streets have the worn purposeful quality of a community that has been organized around a war rather than around ordinary life, the specific texture of infrastructure built for function rather than comfort, message boards and supply caches and the particular alertness of people who have been keeping watch for long enough that keeping watch has become habitual.
I ask for Valentina at three different points before someone takes me seriously, which is the correct number of times, because the first two times are the community testing whether I am who I say I am and the third time is the one that goes somewhere.
She comes to me rather than me going to her, which is Valentina's way, it was always Valentina's way, never waiting in one place if moving was an option.
She looks different. That is the first thing and the most important thing and the thing I have to sit with for a moment before I can process anything else. She looks different in the specific way that full vampires look different from dhampirs, the shift in the quality of her stillness, the particular way she takes up space, the eyes that have moved past the warm brown they were when we were children and into something cooler and more precise.
She is my sister. That is underneath all of the different and it hits me in the chest with the full weight of six years.
We stand on the street outside the building she came from and we look at each other for a long moment in the way people look at each other when the looking is doing most of the work of the conversation.
"You're alive," I say. It is not a sophisticated opening but it is the accurate one.
"I have been alive," she says, and her voice is the same, which is the thing that breaks me slightly around the edges, the specific quality of her voice unchanged under everything else that has changed.
She tells me in pieces, over the next hour, what happened and what she has been doing and what the past six years have produced. The running. The Parliament's hunt. London, the Rookeries, Callum, the war. The embryo, the child, the daughter who is in a preservation chamber in a facility they raided three days ago and who is three months from being born.
I absorb all of it with the specific focused attention of someone who has been a hunter long enough to know how to receive large amounts of information quickly and sort it into what matters now and what matters later. What matters now is that she is alive. What matters later is everything else.
What I have to tell her comes out of me with the specific urgency of information I have been carrying across borders for two weeks and which cannot wait for a better moment.
"Parliament knows you're here," I say. "Not in the general way they have always known. Specifically. There were whispers in Rome three weeks ago, conversations in the Covenant network about a British Parliament session that was being called specifically around a named target." I watch her face. "They want you specifically. What are you planning to do about it?"
She looks at me with the expression she has always had, the one that means she has already had this argument with herself.
"What I have always been planning to do," she says. "Stay."