“Thank you, Nino.” Haruka sits, brings a spoonful toward his mouth and blows before carefully tasting the warm broth.

Already, Nino has surprised him. Haruka hadn’t realized it until this moment, but he’d been waiting for the shallow, elaborate compliments on his appearance. For the awe over the stifled power of his nature or worse, for the blatant sexual advances.

They simply eat in comfortable silence. When Nino speaks again, his question is once more unexpected. “I meet a lot of funny humans while I’m working in my bar,” he says, a certain fondness in his expression. “Do you have human friends? Or do you interact with them at all?”

“I personally do not,” Haruka says. He places his chopsticks and soup spoon beside his empty bowl. “While I feel strongly that we should protect and maintain our unique culture, I also feel that some integration with humans is healthy and necessary.”

“I think so too,” Nino says. “I think positive relations should be encouraged among all beings, regardless of their inherent nature. My older brother, Giovanni, focuses on that in business. He wants to get more vampire and human companies working hand in hand instead of exclusively for their respective audiences.”

“You achieve this on a local level at your bar, yes?”

Nino takes a quick sip of his wine. “I guess you’re right. I have both kinds of patrons. My vampire customers are inherently drawn to me, you know? On a fundamental level. They’re always pretty low-ranking, so they don’t ever cause me any trouble. The humans are the ones I worry about.”

“In what way?” Haruka asks, bringing his own glass to his lips. He has a fairly strong impression of humans from literature and news, but the quiet truth is that he’s almost never had any personal interaction with them. The existence of his race has long been exposed to humans. There are exceptions, but most higher-level vampires remain secluded.

Life for vampires in the contemporary era presents itself as a wide spectrum, where the old world of aristocratic vampire ways comfortably co-exists beside human society.

Nino sits back, making himself comfortable. “Well… they almost always drink too much, then one of three things happens—they get angry, they get sloppy or they become overconfident. Sometimes all three, but those are the worst cases and fairly rare. Angry and sloppy I can deal with easily. Overconfident is probably the most… exasperating? They’re not doing anything wrong per se, so I just have to tolerate their advances. And it almost always starts with the ‘If you were human’ game.”

Haruka tilts his head to the side, a frown creasing his brow. He is wildly intrigued by this insight. To him, Nino is like an anthropologist who has deeply researched and exposed himself to a precarious species—a species that has shown much fear and discrimination toward vampires in the past. “What does this game entail?” Haruka asks.

“It starts with ‘How old are you?’ Usually out of the blue, with no context whatsoever. They’ve probably been sitting there watching me and thinking about it all night. So I tell them, then I get a long stare. Eventually I hear, ‘If you were human, you’d be…’ Insert random age. It’s like they need to establish some frame of reference so that I fit into the mold of their understanding of life. They can’t just accept that I’m a hundred and twelve. Then, depending on the person, I start getting random cultural questions—‘Did you know Mussolini?’ or ‘What about Pompeii?’ And I’m like, what about Pompeii? Did you not hear me say I’m only a hundred and twelve?”

Haruka frowns in disbelief. “So what human age do they typically assign you?”

“Usually something between thirty and thirty-five? Believe it or not, thirty-two is what I get most often. If I opened a bar for every time a human gave me that number, I’d be franchised all across Europe.”

Haruka shakes his head in amazement. “Such an arbitrary and pointless exercise… Pompeii.” Are they drunk when asking these ridiculous questions?

“I know.” Nino shrugs. “But they enjoy that kind of stuff. These playful little games. And they tell me as if it’s something clever—like I don’t have a human do that to me multiple times each week.”

“It sounds exhausting.” Haruka tilts his head back, finishing his drink.

“There are worse things.” Nino smiles, mischievousness sprinkling his expression. “So… if I’m thirty-two, I guess that means you look twenty-nine?”

Haruka’s jaw drops in naked shock. “I do not present as some weak, twenty-something infantile human.” When Haruka was still under a century, that had been frustrating enough. Vampires over a century have the irritating habit of treating younger vampires as if they’re children—as if they understand nothing about life and the complexities therein.

“It’s just hypothetical, for fun.” Nino grins. “So how old do you think you look?”

Flickering his eyes to the side, Haruka briefly considers. “One hundred and one.”

Nino holds his palms up, apprehension set in his amber eyes. “Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any offense—”

“You have cast great insult unto the House of Hirano.”

Nino freezes, blinking. Serious. “I’m so sorry, I—”

Haruka smirks as he reaches to pour himself another glass of wine. Registering the jest, Nino sits back and runs his fingers through his hair. He closes his eyes in a broad smile. “Jesus.”

“You will be flogged forthwith and sent to the dungeons.”

The golden purebred laughs openly, the warmth of it filling the dimly lit kitchen.

Six

The following morning, sunlight pours in through the guest bedroom window like soft lamplight—yellow and with a distinctly hazy quality. Nino lies perfectly still in bed, blinking with his back against the fluffy down bedding. He calmly assesses his surroundings in the tidy room.

He is in another purebred vampire’s house.

For the next three days, he’ll be researching the process of bonding.

Then, he’ll travel to East Sussex to oversee an archaic ritual at Hertsmonceux Castle.

“What the living hell am I doing? Whose life is this?”

Nino takes a deep breath, inhaling the rosy, subtle scent of his new purebred acquaintance. Haruka’s essence saturates every space of his home, which is comfortably nestled between a thick forest at the front of the estate and a wide, open moor at the back. The exterior is comprised of gray stone and white trimmings. It looks like something from a wholesome Christmas fable. Except the halls aren’t decked and there’s no mistletoe.

He doesn’t know how all of this will work out, but he’s here. No turning back. His brother was right. Nino left home with the intention to grow and become more independent, and a perfect (albeit weird) opportunity is staring him in the face. He needs to make the most of it. He will.

Nino gets out of bed, dresses casually in jeans and a warm sweater then heads downstairs. He needs coffee. After being blessed by Asao with a cup, he carries it back upstairs to find Haruka already in the library.

Asao had given Nino a brief tour when he’d arrived yesterday evening, but seeing the impressive space in the daylight is vastly different. The rest of Haruka’s house is cozy and fairly modest, but the library is much more extravagant.

It’s filled with natural light and the walls are lined with dark-oak bookshelves crammed with literature. One area features a cushioned bay window that overlooks the open expanse of the moor. The ceiling is high with warm, modern light fixtures and there’s a black, spiraled iron staircase leading up to a second floor full of books.

Once upstairs, a path lined with the same decorative iron railing wraps around the perimeter of the hollow room. For a touch of character, white candlesticks are mounted in antique-looking sconces strategically placed along the bookshelves.

Haruka is sitting at a handsome cherrywood desk. A wall of colorful, weathered book spines is perfectly arranged behind him. His cable-knit sweater is deep burgundy. When he looks up at Nino, the color reveals subtle flecks of red in his rich brown irises.

“Good morning,” Haruka says.

“Hi.” Nino moves toward him, feeling tense. Their conversation during dinner the previous night was surprisingly easy. They talked about everything from current events in the news to their favorite musicians. Haruka had gone on at some length about classic jazz, particularly John Coltrane and Red Garland.

The reality of being in a stranger’s house still creates a jumbled mess of nerves in Nino’s stomach—like he’s stumbling along blindly in unknown territory or a dark room. At any moment he could easily fall flat on his face.

“Did you sleep well?” Haruka asks.

“I did, thank you. The bed was soft and the room is nice. Everything in your home is so clean and organized.”

“That I cannot take credit for.” Haruka smiles, a certain warmth in his expression. “Asao is the instigator of any tidiness you observe. Left to my own devices, perhaps things would be more… spontaneous.”

Nino laughs, scratching the back of his head. “Is ‘spontaneous’ a euphemism for being messy?”

Haruka grins as he stands from his desk. “To each his own. Do you desire breakfast?”

“No, coffee is good. I’m fine.”

The stately purebred moves toward a small, beautifully crafted live-edge coffee table near a sofa in the middle of the library. There is a thick manuscript bound in tawny leather on the table’s surface.