Page 61 of Hot Blooded

Slightly mollified, Tessa allowed Fran to guide her over to a table of drinks and hors d’oeuvres laid out for human attendees. The conversations with younger vampires and their human bloodmates, after the usual small-talk introductions, tended to revolve around the recently deceased Alex Markov and his now-sireless thralls running around the city. Tessa hadn’t been aware, but was unsurprised to find out, that Amos had rounded up the most thralls of anybody.

“He’s good like that,” she found herself saying with unabashed pride. “He doesn’t do things halfway.”

“Oh, yes,” a vampire woman purred with suggestive amusement. “He’s always seemed like the type to get the job done, if you know what I mean.”

Tessa didn’t know whether she should be laughing along or marking her territory. Fran intervened before she landed on a decision, dragging her off to meet some other people.

“I thought vampires didn’t get horny without live blood,” Tessa whispered irritably.

“Oh, no, the desire is still there,” Fran explained. “But the, er, ability is lacking.”

Tessa’s eyes widened as she gained a new appreciation for the length of Amos’s celibacy and his astonishing willpower at keeping their intimacies from escalating into sex. Except for that one notable slip-up, he’d managed to keep things mostly PG-13 between them, despite Tessa regularly throwing herself at him like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

“Huh,” she said, mostly to herself.

Throughout the course of the night, Tessa met an endless swirl of names and faces that she had no hope of remembering, except for the most outlandish ones—who generally happened to be the old ones. They were often dressed in an odd assortment of period garb. One vampire looked as if she’d stepped straight out of the Sun King’s court. Another looked as if he’d just come from embalming Tutankhamun. Yet another seemed dressed to resume guard duties on the Great Wall of China, including the sword. Most of the old ones, however, wore a mishmash of time periods, including one notable vampire who was wearing a snowy white chiton with gold shoulder clasps over a modern turtleneck sweater along with knee-high black Hessians and a jauntily-tipped derby hat.

The clothing was the least of their oddness, though. It was conversations with them that really tested Tessa’s commitment to making a good impression.

There was a twelve-hundred-year-old vampire who looked all of eighteen, who told Tessa she should forget about Amos and find a vampire who’d be willing to turn her. A two-thousand-year-old vampire asked her if it was true that humans nowadays had computers implanted directly into their brains. When Tessa had answered that, except for a few medical exceptions, no, they did not, the vampire insisted sneeringly that she was wrong. Another two-thousand-year-old vampire, who must have been in his sixties when he’d been turned, kept licking his lips as he stared at Tessa’s throat. Amos’s growl was audible across the chamber, and the older vampire quickly turned away, abandoning Tessa mid-sentence.

Then there was a nine-hundred-year-old vampire who pretended not to speak English, even though Tessa had heard him speaking English to another vampire not two minutes before. Instead, he spoke to her in dismissive Andalusian-inflected Spanish, which always sounded lispy to Tessa’s ear, telling her “I do not converse in your ugly language.” When she’d responded back in her third-generation Mexican-American Spanish, “Then we can converse in yours,” he’d only curled his lip and turned his back on her.

“Un placer hablar contigo!” she called snidely after him.

Fran chuckled. “I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m sure he deserved whatever you said to him.”

Eventually, a low, gong-like tone rang through the chamber. Conversation slowly died away to silence as the entire crowd shifted to face the back wall. Tessa startled as Amos appeared suddenly at her side.

“Okay?” he whispered.

She nodded, looping her arm through his. “Are you allowed to be by me?” she whispered back.

“I am now. The Councilors are taking their seats for judgment. Potential bloodmates will go first for presentation, and we’ll leave immediately after. You don’t want to see the criminal trials.”

“Shhhh!” someone hissed loudly behind them.

Amos shot a dark look over his shoulder, and the shusher fell immediately silent.

My software developer homebody vampire boyfriend is kind of a badass, Tessa thought, pressing her lips together to suppress a smug grin.

On the back wall, narrow stone stairs led up to a long, elevated, pulpit-like platform lined with elaborately carved wooden seats that looked a great deal like thrones. There were at least twenty vampires, dressed in burgundy robes, ascending the stairs to seat themselves over the crowd. Below them, the floor space remained open, in a large circle, while the crowd naturally parted itself to form an open aisle towards the Councilors.

The Councilor seated in the middle, in the throniest of all the thrones, stood, looking down on the crowd. She was a short woman, with light brown skin and long black hair in a single braid laid over her shoulder. From this vantage, it was hard to tell her mortal age, but Tessa guessed she’d been turned at some point in her twenties, maybe early thirties.

“Amos Hansen.” The woman’s voice carried across the chamber with all the weight and resonance of the room itself.

Amos stiffened beside Tessa.

“You are called before the Council,” the woman declared.

“Is this us?” Tessa asked nervously.

“No,” he said, frowning. “I don’t know what this is. Stay with Etta and Fran.”

Tessa watched as Amos wove through the crowd, coming to stand in the open space below the Councilors.

The leading Councilor looked gravely down on him. “Word has reached the Council that you had an encounter with werewolves very close to the city.”

---