Paris, France, 1670

Killian had been back in Paris only three weeks, and he found the streets and alleys to be both familiar and foreign. When last he visited, some sixty years earlier, he had been able to stroll from the north end of the city to the south at a leisurely pace and still arrive at his destination in under an hour. That Paris was gone, replaced by a city more than double in size. The population had doubled in size as well, a happy circumstance for one such as he.

The fledgling night was cool and brisk, stars blinking overhead, a thin crescent moon bright against the dark sky. Killian walked along rue Neuve-Saint-Saveur, then down a long, uneven slope through the Courtyard of Miracles, home to all manner of criminals and thieves. He was quite certain he could find what he needed here.

The houses here were crumbling with age, families living one atop the next in poverty and crime—thieves passing their profession from parent to child. It was a place where he could hunt. He rounded one house, the walls half-fallen, and the hairs at his nape prickled and rose. He stilled, glanced back, but saw nothing.

No matter.

His senses might lie. They might be fooled.

But his instinct was that of a nocturnal beast, a monster, a killer, and that instinct was ever true.

Someone followed him. Not human. Someone like him.

Something primitive inside him recognized another monster, though in all the years he had never encountered one save his maker. He was torn by an instinct that demanded he terminate the interloper and the intellectual excitement of having the opportunity to discuss all manner of things with another like himself.

He kept his stride even and sure, his posture relaxed. Instinct bid him stop, turn, fight, kill the threat, rip it limb from bloody limb. Logic bid him be cautious, be stealthy. Be smart.

He picked up his pace only slightly as he rounded a corner, then ducked down a dark alley, turning to follow another and another, glad this part of the city had changed little since his last visit. In the end, he was behind his pursuer, prey no longer.

He caught a glimpse of a woman walking just ahead.

She was small and delicate, her blond hair piled atop her head in an intricate style, her gown flawless, diamonds at her throat.

Her shoulders stiffened. She turned her head to the right, not quite looking over her shoulder, certainly not meeting his gaze, but he knew she was aware of his presence. She knew he was there.

She faced forward once more and walked, and he followed.

She passed beneath an archway and he walked the same path seconds later, only to emerge on the far side and find the road empty. She was not there.

He started to turn, his movement aborted as a blow of unsurpassed power landed between his shoulder blades, throwing him forward against the wall. He pushed off, spun, and found the road empty still.

For a moment, he was disoriented, trying to make sense of the unexpected attack. He was strong, not in the way of a man, but in the way of a monster that was more than man. His adversary was stronger.

He spun and she closed her hand around his throat. She stared at him, then let him go and stepped back. He vibrated with the need to lunge at her and tear her throat out, to dismantle her body, to—

He mastered the urge; it made little sense. Here was a woman who was one of his kind, the first he had met in hundreds of years of roaming. He had questions. Surely she had answers. Yet, beneath his skin, the primitive need to battle one who encroached on his territory screamed through his veins and made his muscles clench.

“You surprise me,” she said. “Only the very old can manage to stand this close and not bare their teeth and posture and growl. Yet, here you are, watching me, studying me…somehow mastering the need.”

Killian clenched his jaw against the need to bare his teeth and posture and growl.

After a long pause, he said, “You are mastering the need, as well.”

She laughed, a light, tinkling sound. “I have been vampire for over a thousand years. Age makes me wise and cautious—” her lashes swept low “—and able to control myself.” She raised her gaze and met his own. “But you…you are able to do what most your age cannot. You are able to use intellect to master instinct.”

Barely, but he did not say so. Instead, he said, “Why does instinct urge me to mark my territory, to chase you off or kill you?” Even saying the words out loud made a surge of territorial rage swell. He thought of the knowledge this creature surely possessed and held that thought as a way to control the animal need that clawed at him as surely as the hunger ever had. She had walked the Earth for more than a millennium. There was much she could tell him.

“We are predators,” she said, moving her hand to encompass their surroundings. “Predators feed on the prey at hand. There is only so much prey available, and we are a territorial lot, guarding our sustenance. Did your maker not teach you?”

“How could he teach me? Would he not succumb to the urge to kill me?”

“A maker and his progeny are not subject to the territorial instinct. They can live together, hunt together, be together. It is the only chance for long term companionship for our kind.” She sounded sad as she said the last and Killian wondered if she had made a companion, if her efforts had been successful. His one attempt certainly had not.

“My maker turned me and walked into the sun,” he said.

Her eyes widened a fraction. “It surprises me that you survived.”

“In the beginning, I surprised myself.” He paused. “I have questions.”

She nodded and reached for the ornate necklace at her throat. With a twist of her wrist, she freed what appeared to be a tiny dagger. She used it to nick her wrist.

Killian stared at the blood.

She laughed, low and throaty, then put her wrist to his lips. “Sip lightly, friend. It will quell the urge to kill me for a time.”

He did as she bid, her blood strange in his mouth. It neither slaked nor stoked his hunger, but the taste was familiar. It tasted like the monster’s blood that had made him.

She pulled her wrist away.

“Come,” she said. “We will feed and then we will talk and then we will go our separate ways.”