Free Blood Ties by Kevin Emerson Page A

could imagine how much Bane had just enjoyed that. Myrandah turned, still smiling, and immediately reached up and grasped one of Phlox’s earrings: the tiny silver lizard head with ruby eyes. “Why, how Phloxiana favors the modern things,” she commented.
    Oliver watched Phlox’s mouth tighten as she fought a reply.
    And as if to finish her act with a flair, Myrandah glanced casually over Phlox’s shoulder to Sebastian, and her eyes narrowed slightly. “Oh … and she brings the husband along. Aren’t we lucky?” Then she spun and started inside. “Enter!” she commanded.
    Phlox and Sebastian trudged silently after her.
    Bane chuckled. “Grandma’s awesome.”
    The cluttered apartment was lit by long rows of candles mounted on the walls. A short hall led them into a main room, where a long dining table took up almost the entire space. There was no kitchen to speak of, only a brick oven on the far wall, and no appliances like refrigerators or stoves. The walls displayed helmets, weapons, and other more gruesome trophies from human victims, or the wars and revolutions that vampires had a hand in causing.
    â€œThey’ve arrived at last, have they?” a raspy voice hissed. It was Phlox’s father, Dominus, looking up from his hunched position at the table.
    â€œDad, the train was barely late,” Phlox huffed.
    Three other chairs at the table were already filled, by Phlox’s brother, Ember, and Oliver and Bane’s cousins, Misère and Gustav. Their mother, Sylvana, had been slain a decade ago. Ember was older than Phlox, with thinning hair and a weathered face. He wore a rumpled blue coat, an officer’s jacket from the Napoleonic Wars, its condition noticeably threadbare compared to anything Phlox and Sebastian would wear.
    As everyone took their seats, there was a knock at the door. Myrandah hurried over. A young man stood outside, holding a long, thin, black glass bottle with a bulbed base in one hand and a tiny iron pitcher in the other. Each was stopped with a cork. Myrandah exchanged myna for the bottles and brought them straight to the table. She placed the small pitcher in front of Oliver. “Grandma remembers how he favors the tiger’s blood,” she cooed.
    â€œThanks,” Oliver replied.
    â€œAnd this,” she said, “for the rest, fresh from the local oubliette.” She held up the bottle. “A few myna more for the torture-draining, but how worth it!”
    â€œThe very best.” Dominus nodded.
    Everyone had only a goblet in front of them. As the bottle of human blood was passed around, Myrandah delivered a plate to Oliver that held a dish called vesselage. It was a spongy white cake with a latticework of thin red candy tubes spiderwebbing through the cake. Lying on the plate, spiced blood seeped from it in a pleasing way.
    â€œIt’s great, Grandma,” Oliver commented after a bite.
    â€œSuck up,” Bane sneered, and Misère and Gustav nodded in agreement. Misère was a short girl with a round face, her mouth down-turned in a perpetual pout. Her black hair had shocks of gold, and was pulled back and spun around two ivory sticks. She had powdered her face a pure white and painted her lips with shimmering gold as well. She wore a red silk cheongsam, embroidered with gold and fixed by a line of buttons down her right side. Gustav had long brown sideburns and wore a black pinstripe suit with a frilled collar and a tie.
    Sitting there beside them, Bane should have looked like the dangerous one, slouching carelessly, with his wild hair and black T-shirt from the band the Petrified Hearts, which displayed an image of open ribs and a stone heart within. And yet he seemed somehow very tame compared to his cousins. They sat perfectly straight, faces blank, with a presence that was at once calm and lethal.
    â€œIt’s the taste of charcoaled sugar,” Myrandah explained to Oliver, as she did