It doesn't matter whether it's gothic castles, grand chateaus or Victorian townhouses, through the centuries, vampires have always known how to live - at least, those of us at the top of our game. I don't know why it is that a species that really only needs dark and silence, has such a taste for the finer things in life, but there we are. However frivolous it is, I love my penthouse apartment, I love the view it affords of the river, and I love that it is spacious enough to house three women in complete comfort. Only two at the moment. And that's the thing, however much I love this place, I'd give it up in a heartbeat if it meant that I could get Layla back. It takes something like this to tell you what really matters in life, and it's not a fancy apartment.

“Hey, honey, I’m home,” I called into the quiet apartment as soon as I was through the door.

A moment later, the bedroom door opened and Max emerged, running a hand through her hair and stretching. She had those dark rings around her eyes and I knew just by looking that she had been getting about as much rest as I had these last few weeks, since Layla had been taken.

Like Layla, Max was a victim I found on the street. However much my hatred for humans runs hot at the moment, I still reserve my ultimate rage for the scum of my own species - people who take the gift we have for granted. It is easy enough to take blood from a human without killing them - some of them even get off on it - it is equally easy to drain a human dry, killing them clean and easy. Those vampires who turn a victim and then leave them starving, confused and helpless make me sick. When a human is first turned vamp, they need to feed, but they don't know how, they don't know anything. So many die like that - turned accidentally by careless vampires who think the easiest way to fix their mistake is let it die, gnawed to death by an unquenchable thirst.

The vamps who did that to Max, I tracked down, and it was nice to see the fear in their eyes when they realized who they had pissed off, just before I killed them. It may sound harsh, but if you do it a few times, word gets about, and it saves lives in the long run.

Max I had found in that pitiful condition only a few years back, while Layla had been my sister for fifty years now. Blood sister, that is - I fed both of them my blood to bring them back from the brink of death and confirm them irrevocably as vampires.

As the memory came upon me, I could not stop my eyes from turning to the door of Layla's room, empty for the last six months.

"I miss her, too." Max noticed where I was looking.

"I'm just tired."

"Who isn't?" She looked at me with an expression of desperate hope that I knew I would soon be squashing. "Any luck?"

I sat down heavily on the couch. "I found Michael Wambach."

"You don't seem happy about it. You've been looking for him for months." Max sat down beside me. "That means either he didn't have information you were looking for, or... Tell me you didn't kill another one."

"Wish I could." I wasn't going to shed any tears for Michael Wambach. He was in this up to his neck, a neck that I had now irreparably damaged. Layla had been arrested under false pretenses for a crime she didn't commit - drinking from unwilling humans. But before she could be officially charged with this nonsense, the police car transporting her was attacked by five men in black, who kidnapped my sister and killed her escort. All except Wambach. He walked away, not just alive, but unhurt. Not just unhurt, but as I had discovered by doing a little digging, considerably better off financially.

No; I wasn't going to shed any tears for him, but allowing him to die before he had told me what he knew had been... careless. More so since it wasn't the first time.

"I forget how fragile human males can be," I admitted.

"You’d think you'd remember, the number of times this has happened. Did he say anything?" asked Max with a hint of reproach. She was about as concerned for Wambach's well-being as I was, but knew as well as I did that I had fucked up.

"He muttered something like 'We all make choices. I made a bad one. But walk away. This goes deeper than you can possibly imagine.'."

"What do you make of that?"

I shrugged. "Maybe he thought he could make me stop."

"Or maybe he was warning you."

Death bed changes of heart make me very uncomfortable. If you are killing someone who has done something wrong then the last thing you need is for them to realize the error of their ways, even if they are only realizing it because you are going to kill them.

"I tried to stop him bleeding but... I guess I let too much go. I was trying to make him easy to control. Took it too far." I could have turned him, of course, but the last thing the vampire species needs is Michael Wambach added to its ranks. We have a bad enough reputation already.

"It's not your fault." Max put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "You can't blame yourself for being careful, Sonja. You could have ended up with a bullet in the chest."

Wambach was not the first man I had hunted down in my search for Layla. The last one had been a fence who had sold some of Layla's jewelry through a pawn shop. I went in perfectly friendly, pretty sure that he had nothing to do with Layla's kidnap, just wanting to know who he had gotten the jewelry from, and the guy shot me in the chest. Maybe it was just because I was a vampire - some people have trust issues where we're concerned. Ordinary bullets cannot kill vampires but they hurt us no less than they do humans, and while it could not kill me, loss of blood makes us weak and helpless. Having hurt me, the man broke a wooden crate to furnish himself with a stake and came at me.

That was when I decapitated him with a knife I keep in my boot.

Vampires don't need knives, but I found that nine times out of ten, using a knife helped me control myself and stop short of killing, because I'm not tasting blood. Unfortunately, that had been the tenth time out of ten.

"That shit gave us even less," I muttered, rubbing the spot on my chest where the bullet had seared through me.

"It's a bad run," agreed Max.

To a degree, Max was still finding her feet as a vampire, figuring out what kind of vamp she wanted to be, and it was fair to say that she had two very different role models to choose from. I had to admit that Layla would hate some of the stuff I was doing to find her. Even though these were bad people who had blood on their own hands, she would hate that I was hurting and killing for information.

Layla had never wanted to be a vampire, the early years had been very hard on her, and I had coaxed her through as best I could, never trying to turn her into a clone of myself or force her to be something she didn't want to be, but showing her how she could be a vamp, and still be a decent person. Thankfully, she had found her way; she never killed, never drank blood that was not offered, and then only when she had to, living much of her life in hunger. There were some store-bought substitutes that filled the void, but they remain far from ideal. She was the most human vampire I had ever met, and I loved her for that forthright insistence on never losing hold of the person she was.

I, by contrast, was vampire through and through. At my age, I think there is little else that I can be. I sometimes wonder if there was ever a time when I was more like Layla. If there was, I do not remember it, and perhaps that's just as well. Three hundred years is a long time to hang on to memories, I'm no longer sure of who I was before I was turned, but I think I was a pretty rough person then, too. I never took shit from anyone, being a vamp just enabled me to back it up with force.

That difference between us, that attitude of Layla's, was how I knew - how anyone who knew Layla knew - that there was no way she was guilty of what she had been accused of when they arrested her. Drinking from unwilling humans?

Not Layla. No way.

The guy who accused her did so over the phone, saying he'd managed to get away from her but she might be out to hurt someone else. They picked Layla up 'for the safety of the public'. The accuser was a man named Tyler Gray, whom Layla had been dating - they'd been out two or three times - so I knew where to find him and went right over to have a few gentle words in his ear.

When I got there?

He was dead.

He had been for a while, bled out from wounds in his neck, and the police were quick to attribute that to my sister. An act committed prior to her being arrested. They assumed she’d gotten wind of him contacting them and had decided to make sure he couldn’t testify. I guess, if it had been another vampire, then that would have been a fair conclusion, but not Layla.

Even at that point, I don't think I was that worried, I knew that Layla was innocent and, while it can be difficult for a vamp to get a fair trial - what with people's old prejudices - I felt sure there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict her. All they had was a bucket full of hunches and suppositions. But, of course, she never got to trial.

And I needed to find out why.

So far, I was doing a really bad job of it. All I was doing was getting myself on the police's 'Most Wanted Vampire' list. If they found out I'd killed their driver, then that would be that.

"What did you do with Wambach?" asked Max, seeming to read my mind. "I mean, after you did what you did to him."

"Weighed him down and dumped him in the river."

"You think there'll be a fuss over his disappearance?"

I shook my head with more confidence than I actually felt.

"He was on 'administrative leave' following his harrowing experience. Which is code for 'keeping him out of the way because he's clearly on the take and we can't prove it'. Who goes on administrative leave for six months? I'm hoping they'll just be glad he's gone. That way they don't have to address the reality of a crooked cop. Course, if he floats back up, then they'll have to address it."

"Problem for another day."

"Let's hope." I shook my head, grinding my teeth in frustrated anguish. "But with him gone and us no closer... I don't know what our next step is. Someone else killed Gray, someone who framed Layla and then made her vanish. I don't know who and I don't know why. I'll bleed every man in this city if it leads me to the truth but... I don't even know where to start looking. Nothing but dead ends."

Max squeezed my hand. "Something will break soon."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Basic optimism?"

I couldn't help laughing. That was the great thing about Max, she was always fun to be around, carrying into undeath the sense of humor she had carried in life.

"I'll head down to Lawkeepers' Central tomorrow night and kick up a fuss. See if there're any new leads."

The Lawkeepers were the special branch of the police who dealt with vampire crime - both that committed by vampires and against. They were genetically tweaked to make them stronger, faster and tougher than the average human, though still less than a vampire. Technology hasn't caught up to us quite yet, though no doubt it will with time.

They were investigating Layla's disappearance and, to my mind, making a hash of it. It didn't help that she had been in their care when she had been taken, so I didn't have a lot of faith in them to start with. Unfortunately, I had let my disappointment in them get the better of me a couple of times and I was now banned from Central after I had expressed my disappointment by kicking over a few desks, smashing a few computers, breaking one arm. The fuss people make over this sort of thing is unreal.

"Thanks," I nodded to Max. I yawned. "It's been a long night."

"Yeah?" Max frowned. "It can't have taken that long to bleed Michael Wambach and dump him in the river. What else have you been up to?"

I shrugged, not keen to share the details of the rest of my night. "I went for a drink."

"Did you have sex?"

In some areas, vampires have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to secret keeping. Our eyes change color with our emotions. Long experience and blank detachment enables me to keep mine, for the most part, uniformly black, but when Max asked about what I had done that night, a delicious memory of Kael - dammit, I had remembered his name - vigorously shafting me against the wall, had flashed first through my mind then quickly onto other parts. The thought had made my eyes flash green, telling Max that sex was on my mind.

"I'm three hundred years old, Max, I don't need anyone telling me when I can and can't get laid. You're not my mom."

"Well, I hope you at least used protection," Max carried on the joke.

"I'm a vampire - he's the one who needed protection."

"Does Trojan have a garlic flavor?"

I nearly gagged at the thought. "I really hope not. Look, it wasn't a big deal, I just needed to work off some steam."

Max nodded. "Good."

"Good?"

"Absolutely. I think you, of all people, should work off as much steam as you can before it starts coming out of your ears. Letting yourself get stressed isn't going to help Layla any."

That was true, but having casual sex while she was still missing made me feel bad.

"In future," Max continued, "maybe you could get your rocks off before you confront people like Wambach and we won’t be worrying about floaters.”

There was a kernel of truth in that, too.

Had I killed Wambach out of pent-up frustration? Would it have made a difference if I had had a good working over from Kael beforehand? It might at least be worth a try. It was too late for Wambach, but one thing about this search was that it seemed to throw up an unending stream of total assholes.

"Think you can find the guy again?" asked Max. "Must be quite a guy if you're still going green hours after the event." I usually had more self-control where my lovers were concerned - they came and went. Kael had made an impression.

"I don't think that would be a good idea. Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to bed."

"Doesn't have to be him," pointed out Max, calling at my retreating back, clearly now enjoying herself. "Any man will do to scratch that itch."

If only that were true, but in this case, I felt that my body would accept no substitutes.

My bedroom had large windows, which gave splendid views out onto the river, but I had had them blocked up when I moved in. First rule of being a vampire - don't make it easy for them. If all an intruder has to do is pull the curtains to let in the daylight to kill you, then you won't last long. I settled down in my bed, cushioned by black silk sheets - there was that taste for luxury again - and tried to clear my mind of everything.

Tonight, I could figure out my next step.

As I drifted into sleep, an image swam before me of deep brown eyes and rough stubble, accompanied by the keen memory of sharp pleasure. Even in my dreams, I couldn't get away from Kael, and even with my eyes closed I knew they were vibrantly green.

Damn him.