Free The Maestro's Apprentice by Rhonda Leigh Jones

had a slight build, with high cheekbones and short black hair. His skin was pale. Maria frowned at him, while Autumn met his gaze curiously. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, but his eyes seemed much older. All at once he looked down and smiled sheepishly. “Forgive me. The hunger comes upon me suddenly and I don’t have a break for two more hours. No offense meant.”
    “None taken,” Maria said.
    Autumn simply stared, barely aware he was speaking, wondering how old he really was and what it would be like to tempt him.
    “Yeah, well just keep it under control, brother,” Adam said.
    The man nodded at him. “Of course. You’ll want to take the right pathway and go around to the back entrance.”
    “The what? ” Adam said.

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    “I’m sorry,” the man answered. “There is a dress code to use the front entrance, and for access to many of the areas in the house. Plus, in order to stay here for free, each feeder must provide at least one meal to guests or staff per week. It’s all explained in this brochure.”
    “Provide a meal?” Maria said. “You’ve got to be kidding. How are we going to get away from this life if…”
    “Shh…” Adam said, taking the brochure from the guard. “This may not be the best place to discuss this. Let’s go in, get our room and then figure out what to do, okay?
    Maybe we can talk to the management.”
    Maria nodded and looked down. Autumn felt bad for her, and felt guilty that she was excited to be here when the others were so obviously distressed. She took a brochure with a big smile at the vampire, who simply returned the smile, nodded and turned to the next people in line. Then she bounded the two steps to Adam and hugged his arm. “I think it’s going to be fun,” she said, so jazzed about her new surroundings that about it was easy to forget the man in the Internet café.
    “Right,” Adam replied. “Fun.”
    Maria stared at the ground all the way up the walkway.
    They were received in a large, elegant room with about thirty other people in travel and hiking clothes. Some of them hadn’t shaved for days and wore ball caps over oily hair. Autumn tried to figure out which were the vampires and which were the feeders, just from the way they stood. A guy in a faded red Mohawk gave her a menacing stare, nodded his head in a challenge and mouthed, “What are you looking at?” At first she thought he had to be a vampire, but then she noticed the bar code tattoo on the side of his 66
    neck, just as a blond woman in a faded wife-beater shirt smacked him on the arm with the back of her hand. He backed off and stood with his hands clasped in front and head down, but still looked at Autumn out of the corner of his eye like a dog that would have liked nothing more than to take a chunk out of her throat.
    “These are not attractive people,” Maria whispered to her.
    Pleasantly startled, Autumn looked to find Maria offering her a hesitant smile. “Tell me about it,” she whispered back. “The feeders look meaner than the vampires.”
    “Will you two keep it down?” Adam whispered. “Let’s just see what’s going on. We seem to be waiting for something.”
    “Or someone,” Autumn said excitedly. She looked around. The ceilings were a good twenty feet high, with heavy chandeliers and antique, hand-carved furnishings polished to a high gloss and kept around the perimeter of the room, behind blue velvet rope. The walls were lined with shelves and filled with antique implements from daily life like dishes and spectacles. According to the brochure, it was known as the “Secondary Receiving Room.”
    Except for explanations of the process the wealthy Italian entrepreneur Federico Biani went through to contract and build the house in 1890, and its evolution into a private club for the very rich, there wasn’t a lot of information in the brochure. There was no mention of vampires or networking. Autumn guessed they wanted to minimize the amount of information that