Archive of Our Own ^beta

In retrospect, Tom really should have known.

It wasn’t an everyday sort of problem, fair enough—but still, he should have figured it out somewhere along the way. There were signs.

Such as the fact that no one could ever explain how Waystar Royco was still turning a profit these days, what with streaming and climate change and Twitter decimating the film and cruise and news divisions, respectively. Tom had looked at the books, and he was quite sure the numbers were more than a little fucky.

A few times he asked where the revenue was really coming from, and finally Roman said, “We have very effective extraction methods, Mr. Giles,” accompanied by a look so withering it could have dried up the Dead Sea.

Tom, who hadn’t watched much supernatural teen TV, missed the reference. He figured the Roys had worked out some kind of Enron-inspired bookmaking scheme, and spent one night wrestling his conscience over it before deciding it was better to look the other way.

He should have realized that nothing at Waystar was ever as simple as outright corporate fraud.

Or, even further back, there was Tom's very first Roy family dinner, when he showed up 20 minutes early to pick up Shiv because he didn’t have his own driver yet, and he thought bringing her over himself might impress Logan. She was flustered when Tom got to her place, obviously unprepared for him, and for just a second he could have sworn he saw something bright red at the corner of her mouth, smelled a tang suspiciously like copper wafting from her bathroom, maybe even heard the faintest little moan…

But then, he’d never understood makeup all that well, and who knew what kind of cosmetic alchemy a woman of Shiv’s milieu might get up to for a nice evening? And if she wasn’t actually eating any of the food at dinner—and, come to think of it, neither was the rest of her weird pale family—well, Tom just didn’t dwell on it. Maybe love made him stupid. Call it a charming little blind spot.

Really, though, he definitely should have raised more of a fuss about that prenup. Sure, at the time he thought the Roys just had a weird thing about cryogenics. But even so, claiming legal ownership of his blood in the event of his untimely death… that was a flag redder than Shiv’s hair.

Too bad Tom slalomed right by it, coasting on the thrill of becoming filthy rich and the naïve conviction that till death do us part meant, like, another 60 years, tops.

Hindsight was always 20/20. Evidently, Tom shouldn’t have skipped his last optometrist appointment.

So now here he was, a good Midwestern momma’s boy, ensconced in one of Logan’s uncomfortable high-backed armchairs with the Roys all staring him down. He’d been summoned to Logan’s sitting room to “have a little chat” about his future, only it wasn’t a chat so much as a 50-ton weight being dropped from the roof of the Waystar skyscraper directly onto his shoulders.

He stared at his in-laws for a few minutes, paralyzed with the shock of it.

“Vampires,” he said finally, his voice weak. “You’re not, like… I mean, this isn’t some kind of joke, ha-ha, let’s all fuck with Shiv’s new husband, um…”

They were all undead serious, except for Roman, who grinned and bared a set of razor-sharp fangs. Tom flinched, and Roman grinned wider before retracting them.

“No joke, dick-lick,” he said. “It’s all true. The Roys are the bloodsucking parasites draining the American republic of its noble democratic life-force. Someone call the Red Scare girls, maybe they’ll do a special episode.”

Tom squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. When he opened them his predicament remained the same.

Roman was lounging on one end of the couch, Shiv standing behind it and looking down at Logan, whose hand rested on Marcia’s knee. It was like they were sitting for a portrait, and if Tom didn’t make them look pretty enough he was going to get stiffed. Or, like, eaten.

“Okay,” he said, trying desperately to regain some semblance of control over the situation. “Okay, so you’re… what you are. And you need me to—”

“We have a job for you, son,” Logan said again, and smiled (lips shut, no teeth). “A job that only you can do.”

Kendall snorted, and Tom jumped a little, having forgotten he was even there. Kendall was skulking in the corner of the room, nearly blending in with the heavy dark curtains. He was also glaring daggers at his father.

“He means a sacrifice that nobody else is willing to make,” Kendall said, his shoulders hunched.

Logan waved a hand dismissively. “A job, a sacrifice, what’s the fucking difference? Everything has its price, Kendall. You know that better than anyone.”

“Right.”

Kendall stormed out of the room. The elevator dinged, and he was gone.

Shiv looked up at Tom with her blue eyes all round and soft. “Honey, I know this is a lot to take in. But trust me, we’re going to work it all out in the end, okay? All you have to do is stick with us. You’re one of the family now.”

Tom nodded at her, although his heart was racing. He wondered if the rest of the room was aware of it, too, the rush of blood through his body. So alive, and so vulnerable.

“Good,” Logan said, and clapped his hands together. “Now, as you know, those locusts over at Maesbury Capital have made a move on Waystar. The takeover should have have fallen through when my lily-livered son abandoned them and returned to my roost, but alas, it seems he trusted them with a few too many of our dirty little secrets. So, we’ve had to make alternative arrangements.”

Tom was aware that Kendall had pulled some kind of cut-and-run on Sandy and Stewy back in England, although he didn’t know any of the details. Few people ever did, with the Roys.

Marcia sipped from a glass of red wine, and Tom suddenly suspected that it wasn’t really wine at all. He gulped.

“What sort of alternative arrangements, exactly?” he asked.

“You’re the only one who can do this,” Shiv said. “It depends on you.”

“But I’m not… I mean, I don’t even really know Stewy, except for the, you know, the bachelor party, which…”

Tom trailed off and Roman smirked.

“Relax,” he said. “You barely even have to get your dick wet this time.” (Tom cringed.) “All Dad needs is a willing soul.”

Logan cleared his throat. “A willing Roy soul. That’s where you come in, Tom. You’re one of us now. You’re the only member of the family who can step up and do this.”

“It is an honor to be asked,” Marcia added imperiously. “Do not forget that.”

“Asked to do what, exactly?” Tom said, a sinking feeling in his gut. “I don’t know how to stop a takeover bid any better than you all do!”

Logan laughed, the sound harsh. “Oh, Tom, this is about so much more than a silly little bear hug letter. Sandy and I have been at each other’s throats for centuries now. A blood feud, you might say.”

Shiv rolled her eyes. “For fuck’s sake. Tom, it’s just a little business deal, and you’ll be a player in it.”

“It’s an ancient ceremony, Siobhan. Have some fucking respect.”

Shiv pursed her lips, and Tom tried to catch her eye sympathetically.

“Yeah, yeah,” Roman said. “Kendall fucked Sandy and Stewy, Maesbury are trying to fuck Waystar, Dad’s going to fuck them all right back by finessing an agreement instead. But the ceremony requires some… human participation. Congrats, by the way.”

“Human participation,” Tom repeated, Kendall’s words echoing in his head. “Like a sacrifice.”

“Of sorts,” Logan said.

It hit him. “A blood sacrifice.”

“Honey,” Shiv said, crossing to him. “We won’t let anything bad happen to you. This is a huge opportunity.”

“Right,” Tom said, taking her hand. (It was cold, how had he never noticed how cold it was before?) “And so after this ceremony, the family would get to keep Waystar, and I would be… what, exactly?”

“Like us,” Shiv said, her gaze darting to Logan. “Like one of us.”

“You mean… dead. Undead.”

She hesitated. “More or less.”

“Can I, you know, think about it?”

“Of course,” Logan said, although his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “The ceremony will take place on the winter solstice. Do try to RSVP sometime before then. I can only take the suspense for so long.”

Marcia and Logan rose to leave, and Roman trailed behind them.

Tom counted backward in his head. The winter solstice was in late December; it was October already.

Two months to make up his mind. Two months to decide whether he was going to save the company by giving up his humanity, or say no to Logan Roy, who could very well decide to drink him dry anyway.

Two months to live.

A blood sacrifice, indeed.

***

Now that Tom knew the truth about his new family, certain things made a lot more sense.

For example: the fact that none of the Roys really seemed to sleep, and that they spent their lives getting shuttled from one fancy building to another via private jets and shiny black cars, as though stepping out into the sun would literally kill them.

“I mean, not instantaneously,” Shiv said, when Tom asked her about it. “But it’s not a pleasant feeling. It’s like… I don’t know, getting ergot poisoning from eating old bread, or something.”

Tom opened his mouth to tell her that no one had gotten ergot poisoning since about the nineteenth century, but then he remembered that she had technically been born in 1848, and he dropped it.

That was another thing, though: the eating. Now that he thought about it, the Roys surrounded themselves with food the way a dragon surrounded itself with gold coins. They liked to hoard it and look at it plenty, but he’d never actually seen any of them eat more than a few token bites.

The only exception was alcohol. Vampires, apparently, could still get drunk—although he was right that the red wine usually wasn’t really wine after all.

Then there was their whole deal with bathrooms. Shiv mostly avoided hers, which Tom realized was because she didn’t like confronting the empty mirrors. Roman, on the other hand, never missed a chance to look for his own reflection, still transfixed by the fact that it had gone. Tom would walk past an open bathroom door and catch sight of Roman just hovering in front of the sink, gazing into the shiny glass as though, if he stayed there long enough, he would be able to find himself again.

Kendall spent a lot of time in bathrooms, too, but he didn’t care about the mirrors. He liked sinks and bathtubs—anywhere there was water, it seemed. Tom had done some research, and everything he’d read said that running water didn’t get along with vampire physiology, but maybe Kendall was the exception to prove the rule.

Meanwhile, Logan treated the bathroom as a sort of proving ground, like he wanted everyone to know that he wasn’t disgusted by human waste, and that if they were, it was a weakness they needed to excise.

“He’s just old,” Shiv shrugged. “You start looking for novelty when you’ve been around that long.”

Tom wasn’t sure that other people’s piss and shit were the ideal way to spice up the tedium of eternal life, but as a general rule, he wasn’t inclined to argue with Logan Roy.

Which meant, he supposed, that he was pretty much going to step up for the ceremony by default. He still wasn’t entirely sure what it entailed, which made it difficult to come up with a solid reason to refuse. And going through with it would cement his position: a true Roy, and on top of that, the one who saved the company from whatever Kendall had fucked up.

Anyway, once the initial shock wore off, Tom found that the vampire thing was easier to adjust to than he would have guessed. The details were unpleasant, but the Roys always had looked best in the bigger picture.

For the first time ever, Tom landed an invitation to the family Halloween soirée. It came on thick black stationary, the letters embossed in sans-serif silver. Undeniably expensive, yet unbearably ugly.

“Hey, Shiv?” Tom asked, holding the invitation gingerly. “Honey, no one is going to, like, drink me, are they?”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Shiv said, resting a hand on his back. “No one has ever drunk you before, have they? Anyway, Dad serves plenty of refreshments.”

It wasn’t exactly the most comforting thing that Tom had ever heard, but he was pretty sure his role in the Maesbury deal would protect him well enough, so he bore down and went along with her anyway.

Logan’s apartment looked the same as usual—which, to be fair, meant that it was conducive to a Halloweeny sort of mood. Dark curtains, crystal glasses, the Caravaggio on the wall in the dining room.

Tom had never seen the martyred St. Matthew looking down at a table laden with punch bowls of blood, though.

He winced and ducked out to the sitting room.

Connor stood by the window, holding a glass of something clear and gazing out into the night. Tom felt the first few inklings of an idea forming in his brain.

Connor had a girlfriend, after all. Call-girl-friend. Whatever. She was warm-blooded, anyway. Tom still had nearly two months before the Maesbury ceremony. Who said he had to be the only living Roy by the time it rolled around?

“Hey, man,” he said, approaching Connor. “How’s Willa?”

Connor took him in, then raised an eyebrow. “Not falling on whatever sword you’re trying to dodge.”

He strode from the room. Tom swore under his breath. Fucking desert hippie vampire and his little life partner.

“Yeah, you’re not going to get any help from him,” a voice said, and Tom startled. “Connor’s the only one Dad didn’t turn himself, he’s never really inside the important shit.”

It was Kendall, slouched in an armchair.

“How long have you been there?” Tom said, embarrassed.

“Willa would never be willing, anyway, even if Connor somehow got her to agree to get married. And the ceremony won’t work with an unwilling sacrifice. You’re the only one.”

“Right,” Tom mumbled.

“Which means, if you were to refuse, you could blow this whole thing up like Bikini Atoll.”

Kendall’s tone had gone somewhere unexpected: not a threat, exactly. More like… a question.

Tom swallowed. “I’m not going to refuse. It’s the right move for Waystar. Working out an agreement with Maesbury.”

“Agreement is a generous way of putting it.”

“What?”

Kendall narrowed his eyes. “They really didn’t tell you anything, did they?”

Kendall would never just come out and say something directly. With Roman it was because he liked to fuck with people, but Kendall had to put on a show.

Tom gritted his teeth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kendall glanced around the empty room and leaned in closer. “So they still haven’t let you in on how Waystar really makes its money.”

Tom had actually forgotten about Waystar’s books, cooked like fried eggs on a hot summer sidewalk. There was an awful lot to chew on these days.

“Maybe not,” he said, cautious. “What does that have to do with Maesbury?”

“Jesus,” Kendall said. “You didn’t really think Dad would get into bed with Sandy fucking Furness unless there was a gun to his head.”

“I guess I figured it was, you know, advantageous on all sides…”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it just seems like, I’ll probably want to be turned at some point anyway, now that Shiv and I are married, and if my blood can save Waystar—”

Kendall snorted. “Not your blood, dude. Your soul.”

“Well…right. Either way.”

“Uh-huh.” A pause: something Tom wasn’t getting. “Stewy’s not a good guy. He and Sandy will wring you dry. Sandy’s been trying to slip one of his spiteful little tentacles into this family ever since the day Dad dicked him over with the South Sea Bubble. That’s the only reason he’s taking this deal.”

“Well, why is Logan offering it, then?”

Kendall considered, and then made up his mind and stood. “Come with me.”

Tom looked around. The room was still empty, but for the two of them, and it wasn’t like anyone had explicitly told him not to wander off.

“Where?”

“Every blushing bride should get a peek into the cellar.”

Tom got up, his legs a little wobbly.

Kendall led them up the wide staircase, leaving the rest of the family clustered in the dining room. Tom felt his mouth going dry as Kendall strode through a heavy dark door and back toward the bathroom attached to Logan’s study. There was a stench rising out from it, so thick in the air that Tom’s stomach turned.

“This is what you’re protecting,” Kendall said, flinging open the bathroom door. “This is what Sandy and Stewy really have on Waystar.”

Tom peered into the white-tiled room, and what he saw nearly made him retch on the spot.

Bodies. A heap of limp, discarded bodies.

Well, corpses, really. Eyes open, flesh greyish and exsanguinated, drained on the floor of Logan Roy’s bathroom. Piled up so that their heads all pointed in the same direction, like someone had taken care to keep things neat and tidy.

There were perfect little slits cut into each carotid artery, although Tom didn’t think that was how they’d died. Bruises bloomed livid around their lips and noses, like someone had pressed pillows into their faces until they’d suffocated.

It took approximately six-and-a-half minutes to die of asphyxiation, Tom suddenly recalled. Or at least, so said the protagonist of a detective novel he’d read as a teenager.

Six-and-a-half minutes inhaling cotton and trying to scream for help.

They were all still dressed, mostly in the kinds of cheap fabrics and skimpy silhouettes a Roy would never even think of touching. A man tossed down next to the toilet had a small tattoo on his upper cheek. The tip of his tongue protruded from his mouth, bloated and blackened like swollen rotten meat. His eyes were the same blue as Shiv’s, but with the blood vessels popped and the whites flooded crimson.

Tom put a hand over his nose, trying to block out the smell of death as it mingled with all of Logan’s little perfumed soaps. He counted the heads, but lost track around eight or nine as his vision started to swim.

“The blood downstairs,” he choked out. “In the dining room. It didn’t come from a blood bank, or…”

“No.”

“Right.”

Stupid, to have forgotten that this whole vampire thing had a body count. It wasn’t just crucifixes and holy water and Tom signing away his humanity to secure Logan’s legacy. The Roys ate people, or drank them, anyway, and here were the remains all tucked away like so much piss and shit swirling down the pristine porcelain toilet.

“It’s a filthy way to live,” Kendall said, looking almost sympathetic.

Tom shuddered. “But how—I mean, what does this have to do with Sandy and Stewy? They’re killers, too, right? They must have known—”

“Oh, sure,” Kendall snorted. “No one minds a few dozen dead streetwalkers feeding the odd gala, or a drunk turning up on Dad’s Thanksgiving table. But bloodsuckers need to eat every day of the year, and they’ll pay a premium for it. That’s where Waystar comes in.”

“You mean there are more of you.”

Kendall’s eyebrows went up. “Uh, yeah. Hundreds in this country alone. Thousands worldwide. More every day, although we’re not immortal. Just, you know, extended warranty.”

“And Waystar…”

“Keeps them all in blood, yeah.” Kendall smiled bitterly. “You know the saying. Dead labor, feeding off the living. There’s more than one reason turnover is so fucking high in cruises.”

Tom turned away from the shiny white bathroom with its chalky rotting bodies. He put a hand on Logan’s desk to steady himself.

This was what Waystar really did, then. Only, on a scale much larger than Tom could even wrap his head around. Kendall must have gotten the proof to Sandy and Stewy somehow, and now Maesbury was leveraging it against Logan.

“When they turn me, that’s what I’m protecting.” Tom jerked his head toward the bathroom. He couldn’t quite get his eyes to follow.

There was a beat, and then Kendall said, “Only if you agree to it.”

So Kendall was still playing the game, after all. Acting all detached and sensitive, moping alone in the corner, bringing Tom up here and telling him God’s honest truth—but he was a Roy through and through. There was always another layer to it. Always something lurking in the shadows, the real reasons any of them did the things they did.

Tom could still smell the pile of bloodless corpses. He crossed his arms and forced himself to stand up straight. “I thought you wanted the takeover. Weren’t you working with Stewy, back in England?”

“Yeah, well, I fucked that up. This isn’t the takeover I wanted anymore, Tom. It’s a deal between two devils, and it’s your soul that’s sealing it.”

“And if I don’t…”

“If you don’t, then the deal gets ripped to shreds, Sandy and Stewy go public, and Waystar’s dirty bloodsucker laundry gets air-dried in the blinding sunlight of public opinion.” Kendall gestured back at the bodies. “We find a different way to stay in business.”

Tom frowned. “And, what, you think you would take over?”

“Hey, man, I wouldn’t forget you,” Kendall said. “You’re the most important player in all of this. Whatever you want. Glory, COO, eternal life… I mean, not eternal, but you’re in good shape. You’d last awhile.”

There was a clatter from downstairs: the rest of the Roys were moving toward the sitting room, their feast over. Kendall snapped the bathroom door shut.

“We have to get back,” he said, and led Tom out of the study and down the stairs. They settled in armchairs like they had never been gone at all, Kendall’s expression going blank as his father entered the room with the rest of the family in tow.

Shiv still had the faintest smear of blood on her lower lip. Tom could taste it, bitter and metallic, when she kissed him hello.

***

Tom told her everything, because of course he did. She could tell there was something wrong, and she kept asking, and he was exhausted keeping it all inside. And anyway, wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be? An unburdening?

“That hypocritical little leech,” Shiv snapped. They were in bed, Shiv sitting up with a book in her lap while Tom lay stretched out beside her. “He drinks just as much blood as the rest of us, you know.”

“I know,” Tom said. “It’s just, those bodies in Logan’s bathroom…”

Shiv threaded her fingers into his hair. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Ken’s always been such a fucking drama queen.”

“Right.”

It felt good, her cool hand skimming his forehead, and the presence of her beside him. He loved her. Things were complicated between them, sure, what with all the death and destruction, but when they were together, it was easier to forget the bad parts.

“I don’t like my dad’s catering service any more than you do,” Shiv said. “But it’s not like they use people who have a lot of better options. And the families get paid out, too.”

Tom blanched. “Is that… enough?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. “But it’s Dad. You know how he is. He’s always looking for a shortcut. Won’t go to a blood bank if it requires an extra five minutes to orchestrate the theft.”

They sat quietly for a moment.

“Was Kendall right about all of it?” Tom asked, not sure whether he wanted to hear the answer. “The cruises, and Waystar’s secret business. He was telling the truth, right?”

She sighed. “Probably.”

“Probably?”

“I mean, Tom, Waystar isn’t the only place to source blood. Plenty of vampires these days are blood bank-only, and there are places where you can do your own hunting, no questions asked. Anyway, Waystar doesn’t have the infrastructure to be shipping globally, there have to be other companies filling in.” She hesitated. “But, domestically. He’s right that the books have never added up. And I guess I wouldn’t put it past my dad.”

Tom closed his eyes. “Right.”

She stilled beside him, and then said, “Look, obviously I’ll confirm. But we already know Logan does shitty things, right? That’s why we have the plan.”

“Sure.”

She was waiting, but he couldn’t come up with anything else to say.

“It’s a dirty world,” she said finally. “But we’re trying to clean it up a little. That’s the plan.”

The plan was one of the phrases they used in order to orient themselves around each other, like the arrangement. Convenient shorthand so they didn’t have to say the plan for you to take over my dad’s empire that controls the government and kills people and sells their blood. Or the arrangement whereby I love you but not enough to be exclusive.

Maybe that wasn’t fair, though. Shiv ate at Logan’s dinner table, but so did Tom. Shiv wanted things that Tom couldn’t give her, but he wanted the same from her, in his way. They still chose each other and depended on each other. Sometimes he thought the things that made them slightly incompatible were also what glued them together so tightly.

Shiv wanted the company, and if she had Tom and Tom had the company, then that was close enough for her. Tom wanted her, and if he had the company and the company had her, then that was close enough for him.

And, fine, maybe he wanted the company, too. Love was just another game, at the end of the day.

So she wanted to fuck other people. So what? None of them could give her Waystar. None of them would walk onto a second altar for her, alone, and become an entirely new creature just because she needed them to. None of them would drink—

—here Tom’s thoughts ran a little hazy and unpleasant. He supposed he would need to start doing some research on acceptable blood banks.

He could learn to drink human blood. He just wouldn’t become another hungry mouth in the Waystar food-chain, picking through the churn of broken bodies tossed into the wakes of the ocean liners with the giggling tourists and the sad dancers. He wasn’t like that.

He would drink blood because it was a necessity, but he would never live off another person’s death the way Logan did.

He reached up and slid his fingers behind Shiv’s neck, and she brought her face down and kissed him.

“I love you,” he told her. She straddled him.

Back when they first started dating, when she used to call him at 3am and he would rush over to her place and hold her and promise her the whole world on a silver platter, as though she didn’t already have it—back then, Tom felt like he might go insane when he wasn’t around her. Shiv traveled a lot, but when she got back in town he would find her and go insane all over again because they’d been reunited.

She needed someone like him, he was pretty sure. She never admitted to that sort of vulnerability, but it was part of their game, or plan, or arrangement, whatever it was. Coming together and pulling apart, a rubber band deforming and then snapping back into place. Tom needed her, and she needed him to need her.

He found it impossible to forget how cold her body was. He flipped them over and leaned into her and he was thinking about it, the chill against his skin and the shock of her everywhere they touched. He unbuttoned her satiny pajama top and she was soft beneath him, but still, he was shivering. He imagined his body burning like a sun, warming her through, generating heat for the both of them.

It was a pretty fantasy, but as he moved on top of her he could tell there simply wasn’t enough of him to bring a dead thing back to life.

Still, it was nice. She hooked her heels up onto his back, and said all the right things, and he was relieved to be there with her. She slipped one hand in between them and came before he did, and then finished him and let him hold her as they came down.

By the time he fell asleep he had more or less forgotten about dead girls on boats and dead men in bathrooms and breathing fabric instead of oxygen. He dreamt of tongues that were pink and not black, and oceans that were blue-green and not wine-red.

In the morning, he was alone in bed, but Shiv's book still rested on her pillow: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Cute.

He found her in the kitchen, watching the news over a fresh glass of blood. She had started feeding in front of him sometimes, and he was trying to be less squeamish about it.

On the flatscreen, a blonde woman in a sheath dress rattled on about Jeryd Mencken’s new homelessness bill. Shiv turned the volume down and Tom pretended she was wearing red lipstick and not blood.

“Hey, Shiv? When I—you know, start drinking blood like the rest of you guys—”

“Oh, you won’t have to do that,” Shiv said, pushing her glass aside.

“What?”

“Tom, is that what you’ve been worrying about? You won’t have to. I promise. Clean hands.”

“But, I thought…” Tom shook his head, confused. “After the ceremony, I would be turned. Right?”

“Oh.” Her eyes went wide. “Dad didn’t explain it to you? Maesbury are the ones claiming your soul. They do things a little differently. You’ll be turned, but their way, not ours. No blood necessary.”

“I see,” Tom said, although he really didn’t. “But I’ll still, you know, live for a really long time, and…”

“Of course,” Shiv said. “And you won’t need to sleep, or use the bathroom, or any of the rest of that. All of the benefits, without the unappetizing downside.” She gestured at the glass of blood still sitting on the smooth marble countertop. “It’s the best way, honestly.”

Tom nodded.

The blood stunk of copper and rust and decay, and he didn’t ask whose body it came from or whether that person was still alive. He ran a finger along the counter as he left, and then he got into the car waiting outside for him and went into the office.

***

Greg just wasn’t fucking getting it.

“But, like, the exploitation, Tom?” he kept saying, his brow scrunching tighter than a chimpanzee’s asshole. “I guess I’m just not seeing how the, like, structural contradictions of capitalism are relevant here? I mean, don’t all companies profit from working people’s labor-power?”

“Goddammit, Greg,” Tom said. “I don’t mean regular exploitation of the working class. Imagine if there were a job that would literally kill you and suck you dry. That’s like what Waystar does.”

“Uh-huh, yeah, but Tom, don’t people die at their jobs all the time? I heard a report on NPR about Amazon warehouses, and—”

“Why the fuck,” said Tom, pinching the bridge of his nose, “are you still listening to NPR?”

“Well, my car is pretty much, like, I think you would call it a lemon? Uh, and my grandpa Ewan busted in the radio because he said Beyoncé is a class traitor or whatever, so I can really only get the NPR affiliate station now, unless I want to listen to a bunch of static all the time, which drives me pretty crazy. It’s called, like, misophonia, I think.”

Tom gave up on being coy about it. He swore Greg to secrecy—he wasn’t an idiot—but it was clear that if he wanted someone to talk this over with, he was just going to have to lay his cards face-up on the table.

It took him a good twenty minutes to get it through Greg’s head that he meant literal vampires, yes Greg, the bloodsucking kind that kill people and drink them literally, oh my God it’s not a metaphor, you wet-nosed pixie-stick little fuck. Finally, though, they were more or less on the same page.

“And so you would be, like, undead or whatever?” Greg asked, chewing on his lip. “I mean, you would be eating people?”

“I wouldn’t drink the blood myself,” Tom assured him. “Shiv said things are different with Sandy and Stewy. So that’s something, right?”

Greg looked at him skeptically. “I mean, the Maesbury guys must be eating something, right?”

“Well… I suppose. It feels like you’re missing the point here, Greg.”

“I guess I’m just saying, like, if they’re undead too then it seems like they’re probably sustaining themselves with something a little spicier than a Chipotle burrito bowl, you know?”

“God,” Tom said. “You are the most unrefined person to set foot in this building since the construction crew fucked off. Have you learned nothing in your time here? What’s it like, living in the hinterlands and rubbing sticks together to build your fire every night? Would you like some barbecued mastodon to go on top of your Chipotle burrito bowl?”

Greg deflated, and Tom felt the slightest bit bad for him. He squashed the feeling down quickly.

“Well, I guess either way it’s still not great, like from an ethics and morals perspective, that you married into a family of vampires, Tom.”

“No, Greg, but what am I supposed to do about it now? The deed is done.”

“Yeah, but you could, like, not go through with this mysterious ceremony, maybe.”

Tom spun in his chair a little. “If I say no, then the company is toast.”

“And that would be a bad thing?”

“Well, for one thing, Shiv would kill me.”

“Shiv also, like, drinks blood, though,” Greg said, and Tom flicked a Sharpie pen at him. “I mean, Tom, I’m just saying, maybe the world would be a better place if Waystar, you know, got cooked, or some such.”

Tom looked at Greg’s stupid overgrown grade-school haircut instead of looking at his stupid shiny over-earnest eyes.

Why had he thought this would be a good idea? How could Greg, who had all the moral complexity of a sing-a-long Disney cartoon, possibly have anything insightful to say on the subject of a quandary like the one Tom had gotten himself dragged into? He could have gotten the same hot fucking take that Greg was giving him by Googling is murder bad.

“I wouldn’t keep things the way they are,” he said, somehow desperate to make Greg understand it anyway. “I would source the blood ethically, and… you know. Make things better.”

“I’m just not sure that, like, drinking people is more acceptable if you do it ethically,” Greg said dubiously.

Tom rubbed his forehead. “Every hospital in the United States has a blood bank, Greg. How bad could it be to just skim a little off the top? No one even has to die that way.”

“But I think, like, the family would still be basically parasites, more or less,” Greg said. “In the sense of possessing a bloodlust and, uh, sating it with the bodies of countless innocents.”

“Well, yes, Greg,” Tom sighed. “Thank you for bringing my attention to the basic and previously established facts of the situation.”

“You asked for my opinion!”

“It’s not like Waystar is the only unethical company on the planet, you know. Whatever happened to your altruistic concerns about Amazon warehouses? Or do you only give a fuck about dead laborers when you can use them to score a cheap rhetorical point?”

“I mean, I would argue that I brought that up at a juncture in the conversation where I had reason to believe we were speaking metaphorically, Tom, so I think it’s maybe a little bit cheap on your end to try throwing it in my face in our current, uh… position.”

“Sure, Greg.”

Greg squirmed a little. “It’s just, the Amazon guy doesn’t drink people, right? Like, I know it’s not great that he doesn’t let them use the bathroom—uh, and some of them get heat stroke or whatever, but it does feel a lot less, you know, direct, than…” Greg trailed off and mimed sucking on a straw.

Tom wasn’t sure that Jeff Bezos didn’t drink people, actually. He hadn’t exactly asked Kendall for a list of Waystar’s vampiric customers. And anyway, was it really any less pleasant to pull a 12-hour shift on an assembly line than to get your blood drained out your neck?

“You realize that if Waystar goes belly-up, you’ll be crushed beneath its heaving back along with the rest of the barnacles,” Tom pointed out.

“Well, like, I guess that’s another thing,” Greg said, cringing. “It kind of seems like maybe you’re not the most objective—or, like, disinterested party here, Tom, given that you stand to possibly take over the company one day. You know, once you become a—a demon, or whatever.”

“A vampire,” Tom corrected, but he winced even as it came out of his mouth.

There was a flurry of motion outside his office door: Karolina and Gerri rushing by, heads bent over a thick stack of paper.

“Do you think they’re involved?” Greg asked. "In the, uh, unpalatable side of the business?”

The question had occurred to Tom before. He was pretty sure that most of the C-suite was aware of the vampire thing, although whether they were partaking themselves, he couldn’t be sure.

Maybe Gerri. People always did say that she knew where the bodies were buried.

***

In November, Logan cornered Tom in a bathroom—where the fuck else—and Tom officially signed his soul over to Waystar, the scent of stale urinal cake swirling around him.

“It’s the smart move, son,” Logan said, and left him standing alone in front of the toilet stalls.

It was sort of a relief, if he was being honest. He was a Roy now. Why fight it?

Shiv would be pleased when he told her, and they would take over Waystar once Logan was ready to hand it over, and Tom would figure out the whole blood supply situation.

And Greg could go fuck himself. Tom didn’t need to hear about self-interestedness from someone who was more or less a corporate tapeworm, cozying up inside of Waystar’s small intestine.

He was still standing in the bathroom, his gaze fixed on the shiny tiled walls. It was irrational, but he couldn’t help the feeling that if he flung open the stall doors, he would find something awful in there: heads, tongues, an abandoned sock or shoe or…

Irrational. It was a public restroom on the fortieth floor of a blue-chip corporation’s gleaming skyscraper. Not the sort of place where people killed each other.

Tom shook himself and left the bathroom, pausing only briefly to check his appearance in the mirror. He would have to ask whether the Maesbury guys could still do that, he supposed.

***

Thanksgiving with the Roys meant mixed company.

On the bloodsucker side were Logan and Marcia; Shiv and her brothers; and Greg’s grandpa Ewan, whom Marcia had invited for some reason. They were just about evenly matched with the living: Tom; Willa; Kendall’s ex-wife and kids; and Greg, whom Tom had threatened with Soviet-style execution if he let on that he knew anything. Then there were the guests Tom wasn’t sure about: Gerri, Frank, and Congressman Jeryd Mencken, who was Roman’s inexplicable plus-one.

The apartment was bustling with staff, rushing in and out of the kitchen and whisking away people’s glasses the second they were emptied. The waiters looked human to Tom: pale, maybe, but only in a stressed sort of servant way, nothing supernatural.

Yet he was positive that he smelled a little blood, underneath the festive scents of roasting turkey and baking pies. Surely the staff had to know.

“Water-tight NDAs,” Kendall said, his voice coming in low over Tom’s left shoulder.

Melodramatic fuck, always needing to make an entrance. His mouth was twisted up like something was funny and not funny at the same time.

“Yeah, Dad would never want to keep someone around who could betray his confidence,” Roman added pointedly, popping up on Tom’s other side.

“Fuck off,” Kendall said, monotone.

“Oh, go and wash off all your sins, St. John,” Roman snickered, baring a fang. “It’s not time for the pardoner’s tale yet.”

“Uh-huh,” Kendall said, and vanished back the way he’d come.

“Fucking martyr complex the size of Ferrari World,” Roman muttered, and then turned to Tom. “Hey, is there anything in my teeth?”

They were washed faintly red, the wine—or blood—puddling a little in the crevices between each sharpened pearly white, but otherwise there was nothing.

“I think you’re good,” Tom said, trying not to visibly recoil.

“You sure? My hair and everything, too? It’s all fine?”

Tom was taken aback. In all the time he’d spent with Shiv’s family, Roman had never once solicited his opinion on anything. It was uncomfortable and over-familiar, like Tom was being asked to see something about him that had always been carefully shielded before.

Oh. “Are you—I mean, do you need someone to be your mirror?” Tom asked, the words coming out horribly sincere.

“What?” Roman spluttered, which made Tom feel certain that he’d struck a nerve. “Fuck you, man. And bite me. And fuck you.”

He flashed his fangs again and stomped away, snatching up a fresh glass from a waiter. Tom watched him flounce over to Mencken, who eyed him up and down and leaned in close to tell him something.

Maybe it would be worse than Tom imagined, losing his reflection. People liked to look at themselves before they invited anyone else to do it to them. It was a way of making sure all the pieces were still there.

Tom didn’t spend a great deal of time in front of the mirror, but he did like to check now and again—to pre-empt petty criticism, to see what everyone else would see once he left the house. It would be strange, and awkward, to have to use someone else’s eyes for that. Like a remote-controlled prosthetic, or reading the subtitles without watching the movie.

Mencken had a hand on Roman’s shoulder now, and Roman was leaning into the touch.

Tom became aware that he’d needed a piss for the past half hour at least, and he set off for the bathroom.

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find in there. It was Logan Roy’s bathroom, after all, but it was also on the lower level, and there were people—humans—milling all around, and it was Thanksgiving, so it really ought to have been a normal excretory experience. Toilet, sink, fluffy monogrammed hand towel. That was as much as Tom was asking for.

He should have knocked before he flung open the door.

There was a small contraption resting on the tank of the toilet: a clear plastic box, with a complicated white lid and some sort of handle on the top. The box was slowly filling with a dark red liquid, too viscous to be anything but blood.

(Tom didn’t like that he could make that sort of determination on sight these days.)

In front of the toilet was Ewan, gazing down at the contraption, and by his feet was another clear bin, this one open, bearing a heap of something purplish-red and slimy.

“Hello, Tom,” Ewan said calmly.

“Jesus,” Tom said, the stink hitting his nose. It was somehow even more pungent than the usual blood smell—earthy and visceral and dank in his nostrils. “Is that—are those livers?”

“The ancient Greeks believed that the liver was the source of the blood,” Ewan said, gesturing at the contraption, which Tom belatedly recognized as a tofu press. “They were wrong, of course. Nevertheless, a fresh-squeezed liver yields nearly a pint of highly nutritious blood. Not that my brother would agree. He prefers the lighter fare his servants drain from the neck.”

“Oh, God,” Tom said. “You mean you dismembered his—the people, to get the organs out?”

“It’s a mortal sin to waste perfectly good food, Tom.”

There was a plunk from the tofu press as a particularly large blood clot dropped out of the squeezed liver and into the pool gathering below it. The clot floated red-black toward the corner of the container, slick and phlegmy and spinning slowly. Tom could have sworn he could feel it, slippery and suffocating, lodging itself into the back of his own throat.

He forced himself to look away.

“Surely it’s worth a little food waste if it means, you know, leaving the bodies intact, though,” he said, his voice weak.

Ewan snorted. “Figures. My brother always did think a pretty corpse was better than a useful one.”

“I’m just…” Tom trailed off.

“These miserable bastards wouldn’t be any less dead with their organs left festering inside of them,” Ewan said. “The walls of this apartment are laced with blood. The whole damn company runs thick with it. This is what you’ve agreed to become.”

"Not exactly,” Tom tried to point out, but Ewan just snorted again and turned back to his blood-soaked tofu press with its macerated liver.

Tom backed out of the room.

The other downstairs bathroom was tucked off beside the kitchen, which wasn’t a place Tom particularly wanted to explore right now. But the thought of going upstairs made his stomach clench, so he steadied himself and then followed one of the waiters anyway.

The kitchen appeared utterly normal. Cranberry sauce bubbled on the stove; waiters were stacking plates and table linens, then carrying them out into the dining room. Tom couldn’t see the faintest trace of blood anywhere, nor could he smell it any longer.

Wherever the Roys’ real meal was prepared, it wasn’t in here.

The dinner itself was mostly uneventful. Tom ended up next to Mencken, who filled a plate with food but touched none of it.

“Not drinking?” Mencken asked with a smirk, and Tom realized that their glasses were both devoid of blood.

“Not exactly—um, my cup of tea,” Tom said. “So to speak. What about you?”

“I have highly selective tastes," Mencken said, and smiled with teeth that were dazzling white but appeared to be a normal, human sort of shape.

There was something off about him, some way he had of sucking people in and charming them stupid. Tom didn’t care for it. He had a dizzy feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he looked at the man, as though, if he wasn’t careful, he would find himself doing anything Mencken asked him to, and he would want to do it, to.

He glanced around at the rest of the table instead, inserting himself into a conversation with Shiv and Marcia. Both of their plates were untouched, although they were well into glasses of deep, rich blood.

It was strange that Tom used to think it resembled wine. The longer he really looked, the bloodier the Roys’ table was.

It wasn't until after everyone was done eating—or drinking, anyway—that Tom realized the guest list wasn’t just a matter of the Roys having a strange idea of what constituted a social nicety.

No, everyone had been invited there for a reason, and Mencken most of all.

They migrated to the sitting room, Mencken in an armchair with Roman standing beside him. Logan was on the sofa opposite the two of them, like he was conducting an interview. The human plus-ones had been safely dispatched to another room. Gerri and Frank and the rest of the Roys spread out behind Logan.

Mencken had been on the news for a few weeks now, ever since he’d introduced his new homelessness bill on the Senate floor. Tom had only mustered up a vague sort of awareness of the whole thing, distracted as he was by corpses and mysterious vampire business ceremonies. He thought the bill had something to do with reducing the number of people sitting on sheets of cardboard on public sidewalks, and he’d assumed it would have little to no impact on his own life.

Frankly, he hadn’t even been entirely sure why Mencken was bothering with it. He wasn’t the sort of politician who usually cared about mushy social issues.

What Tom hadn’t quite picked up on was the fact that Mencken’s bill included a lot of language about removing people from the streets, and none at all about where they would be moving to. Most of the time, when politicians wrote bills like that, it was because no one really gave a flying fuck about homeless people, and the bill wasn’t going to accomplish anything except energizing a few do-gooder types in the base.

Apparently, when Mencken wrote bills like that, it was because he actually gave a lot more than a flying fuck about homeless people. He had figured out a way to monetize them.

“It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said, flashing that smile again. “Our cities will be cleansed of their undesirable elements, and your family will have… your desires met in the cleanest way possible.”

Logan leaned back and templed his fingers. “You understand, of course, that Waystar already has ways of procuring what the family needs.”

“Sure,” Mencken said. “Plenty of things fall into the ocean, right? I get that. But listen, what I’m talking about, it’s a whole new universe of possibilities. Total ease of access. You think you’re getting away with murder now, just wait until you see these degenerates. No one notices they’re alive, no one cares when they’re gone. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, except that I’m offering you one right now.”

“How fucking generous, using Waystar as your personal garbage dump.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Mencken said. “I have an angle, sure. But so do you. I get the middle class drooling over their shiny clean streets, and you make sure the wealthy go to bed with full bellies every night. We eat from one another’s hands, so to speak."

He turned his head and made eye contact with Roman, who moved in a little closer, practically hypnotized.

Tom was no blushing virgin, but it felt somehow obscene, watching the two of them. He coughed a little.

“Yes, Tom?” Logan said.

“Oh—nothing,” Tom said hastily. “Sorry.”

“Hmm.” Logan gave him a once-over. “Well, if we take Jeryd up on his offer, we’ll want to push the corresponding line over at ATN. It might be good to have some new blood running through the place. What say you, Tom? Want it?”

“Dad,” Shiv said, her tone sharp.

Her eyes flashed; a moment passed. Tom couldn’t come up with an answer that wouldn’t piss off either his wife or his father-in-law.

“Jeryd, thank you for coming by,” Logan said at last. “You’ve given us a lot to consider.”

Mencken recognized the dismissal. He delivered a round of good-byes that were polite, though somehow still arch, and then took his leave.

Roman half-rose, as though to follow him, but Mencken pressed a hand onto his forearm and Roman stayed behind.

Logan turned to the rest of the room with an eyebrow raised, and the jockeying began.

Shiv despised Mencken, and didn’t want Tom to take the ATN position if it meant working with him. Kendall kept saying something about the business fundamentals, which no one else but Frank gave two shits about. Gerri was noncommittal as usual, and Connor was insistent that Mencken had loose sexual mores and posed a threat to the American social fabric, which Tom thought was rich coming from a man whose most intimate relationship was a financial transaction. Ewan inveighed against the entire Waystar empire, which the rest of them disregarded.

Tom was mostly trying to figure out Roman’s deal.

Mencken wasn’t bad-looking, he supposed—tall, clean-cut, strong features—but his hold over Roman went beyond that. It was like he had some kind of siren song.

Although, anything was possible.

“Hey, Shiv?” Tom murmured, leaning over to her. “Is Mencken, like… a seductress?”

“Incubus,” she replied, loud enough that Roman caught it.

“Oh, fuck off,” he said. “It’s not like he can get to me, anyway.”

Tom looked at Shiv, confused.

“They seduce sleepers,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Not a problem for us.”

It seemed like Mencken had plenty of purchase on Roman’s psyche regardless, but maybe political seduction was different from the other kind.

What a pair they were, though. Roman, who had to use other people to see his own reflection, and Mencken, a trick mirror showing only an inverted image of himself.

Tom wondered whether they just stared at each other all day as foreplay.

***

It was another two weeks before Tom found out what the Maesbury deal would actually mean for him.

The thing was, he wasn’t even fishing for information about it anymore. He was distracted by Mencken and the ATN offer, and the less he thought about the ceremony the less daunting it was. He could almost convince himself he was good at compartmentalizing.

He was aware that Mencken wasn’t a particularly savory character. His politics were all vitriol and xenophobia and—well, it was an unpleasant word, but there was no real way around it—fascism. It wasn’t the sort of thing Tom wanted his name attached to, in a public sense. The plan was supposed make things better, or at least it was supposed to prevent them from getting worse.

Yet there was something alluring about Mencken that went beyond just his physical powers of seduction. It was like, when Tom was around him, he became aware of things about himself that he had shoved under the surface: what he feared, or what he really believed in, or—and above all else—what he really desired.

It wasn’t like he wanted to think that homeless people were gross. But Tom lived in a world where dirt was an affectation nobody adopted. Things were shiny and sleek and clean, and when he saw the homeless sitting on the sidewalk with their beards untrimmed and the crumbs of their last fast-food meal scattered around them attracting rats and pigeons, it disgusted him the same way that the heap of bodies in Logan’s bathroom had disgusted him.

When Mencken talked, Tom didn’t have to pretend that he was feeling any differently. It was a logical fucking reaction. It was an evolutionary adaptation. It was natural.

He was pretty sure this was what made Roman keep hanging around the guy, too. It wasn’t like they were fucking: something bad would happen if they did, Shiv said, though she was vague about it.

But when Roman was with Mencken he became a different version of himself. He was still mean, sometimes even cruel, the way Tom felt himself becoming cruel, too. But he was calmer about it, like he no longer felt the need to come out with his usual barrage of off-the-wall insults and defensive quips.

Mencken got people to take their masks off, and he never recoiled when he found something disgusting underneath. No wonder he appealed to Roman, who usually dressed in the costume of a court jester and hadn’t seen his own face since 1799.

Shiv fucking hated Mencken, and everything he stood for. It was an argument she and Tom had so many times, it was becoming rote.

“He’s fucking dangerous!” she would say, her shoulders held rigid. “The things he says—they have a body count, Tom!”

“But they’re things that people already think,” Tom would return, just as agitated. “Politics isn’t a game of peek-a-boo—the ugly shit is still there even when you try to ignore it. This is the country we live in. Don’t we owe it to the viewers and the shareholders to represent it accurately?”

He wasn’t sure if he really believed it himself. But it always set her off on a rant about the social responsibilities of corporations, and then he would say that if America wanted a Jeryd Mencken then Waystar had a fiduciary responsibility to serve one up, and they would circle round and round like that without ever mentioning the blood and the bodies that Waystar already chewed up and spat out all on its own, no Mencken required.

What pissed Tom off was that he was almost positive that Shiv felt it, too, that brutal bitter honesty that set in whenever Mencken was around. She liked to pretend she was some kind of blue-blooded saint, but she walked past the filthy people crouched on the sidewalk and ignored them just like everyone else. She had murder in her refrigerator, and she justified it to herself because the people she drank were beneath her. They were needy and ugly and rejected by the world, and she was in the C-suite ruling over them.

Shiv just stayed away from Mencken because she needed to believe she was better than him, and being around him made it impossible to keep up the act. He was a confessional booth, but without the pervy old priest dispensing forgiveness on the other side of the screen.

People wanted depraved things. What was the point of pretending otherwise?

The problem was that Logan had made it clear that Tom was only getting ATN if Mencken stuck around, and that threw a wrench in Shiv and Tom’s whole plan. If Shiv wouldn’t budge on Mencken, but she also wanted Tom to have ATN, then Tom needed to find some way of dispatching Mencken without pissing off Logan.

It was Greg, of all people, who finally pointed out the obvious next move.

“Well, like, what do the Maesbury guys think of Mencken?” he asked, and Tom felt like such a colossal idiot for not having thought of this himself that he spent the next five minutes berating Greg for his taste in neckties and girlfriends and music.

When he was done he felt a little better, and also he had a plan of action: namely, he would go find Stewy Hosseini, and he would leverage his position as the blood sacrifice in the solstice ceremony, and Stewy would nix Mencken.

Surely, if the guy really was a fascist, Stewy wouldn’t want him hanging around the company he was hitching his own financial wagon to. And this way, Logan would never have to know that Tom was questioning his judgment.

Clean company, clean hands.

He thought about asking Kendall to help him track Stewy down—the two of them had some sort of psychic bond; they always knew how to find each other—but Kendall was still trying to tank the Maesbury deal, and Tom was still avoiding him. He also didn’t want to walk straight into Stewy’s office: people talked, and if Logan thought something smelled fishy, Tom was fucked.

Instead he got Greg to tail Stewy for a week straight. Greg’s surveillance tactics were crude at best, but at last Tom did manage to corner Stewy alone.

It was in Central Park. After sunset, naturally.

Tom had first met Stewy at his bachelor party. That night, in the darkened warehouse, Stewy had seemed slightly dangerous, but only in a douchey equity-guy kind of way. Then, at the wedding, they’d had a few polite conversations, but Tom was always looking around for Shiv, and Stewy was busy scheming with Kendall.

In the park, on the other hand, it was undeniably clear that there was something off about Stewy. He acted like an unbridled hedonist: his clothes were even nicer than what the Roys wore, and his voice somehow oozed wealth. He was all taste and luxury and material niceties. Yet Tom had the distinct sense that Stewy didn’t care about any of it one way or the other. He gave off an aura of absolute detachment, as though he lived in an entirely different world from the one everyone else was trapped in.

It made Tom feel almost competitive, in an empty sort of way. Like he needed to consume every last scrap of pleasure the world had to offer, and at the end of the day Stewy would still manage to come out ahead somehow.

If Mencken got people to admit to what they already wanted, Stewy conjured up new desires deep inside of them—desires that they’d never be able to sate. Tom felt more existentially unsettled the longer he talked.

“Tom,” Stewy said finally, interrupting him mid-sentence, his voice silky. “I need you to understand fully, and without any lingering doubt, that I do not give a single solitary fuck about Jeryd Mencken or the sordid back-alley deals he wants to make with your father-in-law, and continuing to talk about it is a waste of your breath and my time.”

“Um,” Tom said, feeling distinctly like Greg. “I just, with all of the murdering… I guess I thought you might…”

Stewy shook his head, his expression vaguely amused. “Blood doesn’t bother me. Life is too dull for scruples. It's far too dull for hypocrisy.”

Tom frowned. "But Shiv said you guys don’t… I mean, with the blood. I thought you were a bit different from the Roys.”

“Oh, we are.” Stewy’s voice had gone even softer. “I’m a much worse thing than a silly little leech. I drink right from the source.”

“What—” Tom gulped. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“The soul, Tom. Maesbury has no need for blood. It’s only a conduit. Our methods are much more refined.”

Tom was, once again, entirely out of his depth.

The Roys didn’t have souls, and Tom understood what that meant for them. Mirrors, and running water, and so forth. He could deal with that, he thought.

But when Shiv had said that he wouldn’t be drinking blood, he should have asked what he would be feeding on instead, because there were other ways to go about this whole business of draining people. Once Sandy and Stewy turned him, he wouldn’t really be soulless, properly speaking. He just wouldn’t have his own soul any longer.

It was why Stewy had such an air of contradiction about him, an emptiness and an over-fullness all at once. There was nothing of himself left, only an amalgamation of other people’s desires. It was pure sensuality, hollower than anything the Roys could ever imagine and simultaneously stuffed to the gills with feeling. He took the one thing that was supposed to last forever—a person’s soul, their essence, the truth of them—and enjoyed it like a melting ice-cream cone. And then he did that again, and again, and again.

Stewy was amused by Tom’s naïveté. He took them out out for the evening, to a club hidden so far underground—literally—that the temperature had dropped about thirty degrees Fahrenheit by the time they sat down. The walls were jagged stone, the high ceiling dripping with stalactites and a few improbably lovely chandeliers. People danced, languid and sinewy, most of their mouths stained red.

“Are they all… you know,” Tom said, apprehensive. “Dead?”

“Mmm.”

“Will they smell me, or come after me, or something?”

Stewy laughed a little, and the sound chilled all the way down Tom’s spine. “Not as long as you’re with me.”

Tom moved a little closer to the table.

“So you don’t care about Mencken,” he said, and Stewy sipped his Macallan and said nothing. “Why did you bring me here, then?”

“Call it a trial run,” Stewy said. “It’s a long life you’re signing up for. More time for more indulgence than your puny human mind could ever conceive of.”

“You kind of seem like you’re not enjoying it that much.”

Stewy cocked his head. “Too much feeling is almost the same as not enough, Tom.”

“Almost?”

“Almost,” Stewy agreed. “Your Roys do get a respite, eventually. There’s nothing anchoring them to this earth but the blood they expropriate from other people. The connection only lasts so long.”

“You mean… that’s why they die?”

“More or less.”

“And you—”

“Won’t.”

Tom curled his fingers around the chilled glass of lager in front of him. He tried to process the information with Stewy’s air of utter apathy, but his stomach kept lurching around inside of him in a deeply human way.

What was fucked was that, up until this moment, he would have assumed that immortality would be kind of an ideal situation. If he wasn’t going to die, then none of his mistakes would matter. It would be like having the slate wiped clean, the ledger forever blank, always another chance and another sunrise. He could do anything, if only he had the time.

But then, if it meant becoming whatever Stewy was—giving up all of himself and getting only these insubstantial wisps of other people to fill in the empty space that was left behind—then the prospect seemed more nauseating than anything else.

Stewy drank in life the way the Roys only pretended to. And yet, somehow, the accumulation of it only made it worth less.

“Do you still love people?” Tom asked.

Stewy’s mouth curled up at one side. “You’re worried about about Shiv.”

“Yeah.”

“You won’t love her,” Stewy said, and Tom flinched. “But she doesn’t love you, either. Not the way you love her now.”

Tom shook his head. Then he said, “Why are you telling me all of this? Aren’t you worried I’ll fuck the Waystar deal?”

“The deal matters to Sandy, not to me,” Stewy said. “Sandy is the one holding a grudge against Logan. It’s a little uncouth, to be honest. I’m happy either way—take Waystar, or get a man inside the family. Anyway, I’ll have both, eventually. And I can wait a very long time.”

“So that’s what I would be?” Tom asked. “Your immortal mole?”

Stewy shrugged, looking bored. “We would retain a claim on you, yes. We’d take your soul, Tom. You’d always owe us.”

“I would owe you,” Tom repeated. “For taking my soul.”

“An act of creation is never repaid in full,” Stewy said. “Don’t tell me you never went to Sunday school.”

Tom had gone to quite a lot of Sunday school, although he didn’t remember any lessons about immortality or vampires or drinking blood or stealing souls. He would have suspected Stewy of playing some sort of mindfuck long game, except that the guy was so blatantly self-interested that it had somehow morphed into a total lack of concern for anyone else’s affairs. He barely even cared what Tom was saying to him at this very moment, except insofar as he found some of it slightly funny.

Too much, and not enough.

“What if I became a Roy instead?” Tom asked, throwing caution to the wind. “A real one, blood and all.”

Stewy fully laughed at that one. “Please. You want to join that slither of neurotic, half-drowned leeches? You’re better off dead.”

Tom paused. “What do you mean, half-drowned?”

For the first time all night, Stewy’s expression registered something besides boredom or amusement. It was just a flash, but it was there nonetheless, a perturbation crossing a still pond.

“There’s nothing filthier than stolen blood,” Stewy murmured, and smoothed his face out again. “It’s why they can’t cross running water, you know. It’s too pure.”

“You mean—Kendall.”

“Kendall,” Stewy agreed, and this time Tom pinpointed the expression before Stewy could wipe it away.

Pity.

“So, what do you mean, his water thing—he’s hurting himself, or…?”

“Kendall is God and sinner and executioner, all in one,” Stewy said, and tossed back the rest of his single-malt. “He’s the only one of that pathetic bunch who really could be in it for the long haul.”

***

Shiv stayed out that night.

They had the arrangement down to a science now: she sent a casual-sounding text, like she was with a friend or stuck at the office. Tom replied with a thumbs-up. Shiv fucked someone else, and Tom slept with his limbs strewn all across the queen-size bed in their apartment.

Tom couldn’t sleep tonight, though. His eyes would close and it felt like there was water creeping up his face, seeping into his nose and mouth and swirling over his eyes. Blood in the ocean or holy water in the tub, drinking in the sin or purging it out through his skin. He would live too long or not long enough and he would always be alone.

He rolled over and picked up his phone. Scrolled down to Shiv’s name, clicked on the tiny photo. It was one he had taken, way back on their first real vacation as a couple.

Majorca, Shiv’s pale skin protected by a massive floppy hat.

The call went straight to voicemail. Her greeting was perfunctory, and it ended before Tom had decided what he wanted to say.

“Shiv, it’s me. Just letting you know I was thinking about you tonight.” He paused. “I can’t sleep like this.”

He had no idea what this was.

He erased the message and hung up.

He scrolled over Roman, who sought himself in the mirror, and Kendall, who cleansed himself in the water, and his own mother, who was sleeping and who still thought all the bodies lost from the Waystar cruise ships were just bloated and rotting at the bottom of the sea.

“Tom?”

“Greg,” he said, relieved. He clutched the phone like a lifeline.

“Tom, it’s pretty late, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

There was a rustling, like Greg was repositioning himself in bed. “Uh, did you need something? An errand, or something?”

“Not really,” Tom admitted, and then, “It’s all really complicated, Greg.”

“Uh-huh.”

Tom could hear him breathing into the receiver. Greg was a mouth-breather; he said he had chronic rhinitis. Tom thought he just had poor manners and a stretched-out nasal cavity.

“I’m not sure what I want,” Tom said.

“Do you mean, like, on an existential level?”

What kind of a dumb fucking question is that?, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it out loud.

“I guess so.”

“I see,” Greg said. “Well, I don’t really think anyone knows about that kind of thing, you know. But you’ll have a lot of time to figure it out. At least, like, more than the average person gets.”

Tom closed his eyes. “I think having more time is a bad thing in this case, buddy.”

“Oh.” Greg mouth-breathed some more, and then he said, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Tom.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Well, me too.”

***

Shiv was back by the time Tom woke up. She’d already drunk her breakfast: he could smell it when he walked into the kitchen.

“Sorry I missed your call last night,” she said, her voice bright and cheery.

“No worries,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.

“Did you need something?”

He stood there in the kitchen with his hands at his sides and sunlight streaming onto the countertop. He didn’t know how to have this conversation. He didn’t even know what conversation he needed to have.

“I met up with Stewy Hosseini last night,” he said, when the silence had gone on a few beats too long.

“Oh, yeah?”

She was angled so that he couldn’t see her expression. Her tone was still light. Her shoulders didn’t twitch.

“He said that…”

Tom couldn’t choose. He couldn’t choose which of the things Stewy had said, and he couldn’t choose which of the things he might become, and he couldn’t choose which of the plans or arrangements Shiv had made.

They had made. He and Shiv. They’d planned and arranged it all together; it was his own hands around his neck now.

“I love you,” he said, instead of finishing his sentence.

She turned to face him, smiling, and said “You too, honey.”

Her fangs were retracted, and the blood was gone from her mouth. It all felt simple again.

“Do you want to?” he said, running a hand down to her waist, and she smiled and leaned in and kissed him.

“I love you,” he said again, and he kept saying it, and to her credit, she did say it back.

He didn’t ask her how she loved him: like a person or like a vampire? With a soul? With blood?

He couldn’t ask because he couldn’t know, but he also thought maybe he couldn’t not know.

(In a way, hadn’t he always known? Didn’t she always tell him she would choose the company over him, wasn’t that part of what had attracted him to her in the first place, wasn’t he always just choosing her choosing him by doing what her father had asked?)

He didn’t even get them undressed all the way, just shimmied her pants off one leg and left them dangling absurd from her other calf. His own pants stayed bunched up halfway down his thighs. She said she loved him and he came, hard.

He felt drained afterward.

He got dressed again and went looking for his watch. He thought maybe he had left it in the half-bathroom near the sitting room, and he reached for the little gleaming doorknob.

“Oh,” she said, jumping up, still re-buttoning her pants. “You probably don’t want to go in there right now, honey.”

She had the decency to look guilty about it, at least.

***

Logan was set on Mencken, and Roman was delighted. They’d attached Mencken’s offer to the Maesbury deal, and Tom was at the center of the whole thing. Waystar would get a huge capital infusion, and Tom would get a total soul ex-fusion.

Shiv kept saying she wanted Tom to have ATN, but she also kept saying that someone like her needed to clean it up. If Mencken brought in his crush of dead hobos, it would only get dirtier. Tom’s hands would be drenched with blood, despite the fact that he wouldn’t be drinking the stuff himself.

Logan was dying—he’d been sickly even when he was turned, back in 1651; he was on long-borrowed time by this point—and someone would have to take over Waystar. But the timeline was all fucked, and Tom’s soul was on the line. December was ticking down.

The new plan was simple: Tom would show up for the ceremony—and then, at the last minute, he’d refuse to take part. Shiv said that would give him leverage, and they could renegotiate the Maesbury deal to exclude Mencken. Save the company, lose the fascist.

What she never explained was how the new deal would look. How was Tom supposed to keep ATN if he ousted Mencken? And what if the Maesbury guys just walked? There were a lot of plates spinning.

It wouldn’t exactly be a shock if Shiv wanted to take Waystar for herself. And it was even possible that she was right—that there was some cosmic moral ledger out there, and that it was better, on an objective level, to steer clear of Mencken. Stay out of the red, so to speak.

But it was also possible that Mencken was Tom’s only ticket up. If he lost everything—ATN, Waystar, whatever sort of eternal life he was being offered—Shiv would be furious. She could lose the company, too. She’d never forgive him for that.

Mencken had plenty of populist support, anyway. If he was going to be worming his way into America’s political consciousness no matter what, then maybe it would just be foolish to turn him down. They could keep him on a tighter leash if they brought him inside.

Take the deal. Don’t take the deal. Try to keep Maesbury, without Mencken. Tom was getting a lot of headaches these days.

He found himself standing in Kendall’s office. There was a smear of something rusty-brown on the back of one of his silver picture frames. Tom studied the stack of papers beside it.

“I talked to Stewy,” Tom said.

Kendall sucked his breath in. He got up and crossed the room, shut the glass door quickly, then sat back down at his desk.

“And what did Stewy say?”

“That the ceremony won’t make me a vam—a Roy,” Tom said. “I’ll be something else.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He said taking souls isn’t exactly like drinking blood,” Tom said finally, and Kendall nodded.

“Stewy doesn’t have a dog in this fight. He gets the money either way. Whatever he told you, it’s true.”

Tom wondered if the clean water ever left marks on Kendall’s skin. If vampires healed. If it burned, or if he could die in there, in a fresh-drawn bath or an over-chlorinated pool.

Instead of asking, Tom said, “He told me I would live forever and I would want to be dead for the rest of time.”

“Yeah,” Kendall said. “That’s pretty much the shape of it, as I understand.”

They eyed each other.

Tom said, “It sounds like a pretty fucking shitty deal, from where I’m standing.”

“Uh-huh.” Kendall fiddled with a sleek black pen. “Well, you already told my dad you were agreeing to the ceremony.”

“Yeah.”

“But you remember that the human participant has to be willing.”

“Right.”

“Which is really the only thing you’re in control of at this point, dude. Your own will.”

Tom had the distinct sense that his will was, in fact, the last thing he was in control of at this point. He nodded anyway.

“The details have gotten somewhat complicated,” he said. “What with the Jeryd Mencken factor.”

“Dude, fuck Mencken,” Kendall said. “Fuck Waystar. Fuck all of it. The question is, how do you want to spend the rest of the time that you allot yourself?”

Kendall didn’t understand that the things Tom wanted were precisely the things that were making his decision messy and hard and not objective. What the fuck was the point, if it wasn’t about Mencken and Waystar and the rest of it?

His eternal soul, or whatever—that was a tiny, stupid detail. The company, on the other hand, was a behemoth and its fate rested in his hands.

Tom wondered if Kendall even knew why he was drinking all that blood anymore.

Greg turned up to Tom’s office a few days later, looking sheepish as he loitered on the threshold.

“What, Greg?” Tom said, exasperated, when it became clear that Greg wasn’t going to spit it out without some prompting.

“Uh,” Greg said. “Well, I’ve been, like, reviewing our positions. In terms of, you know, your soul and such and where I stand in terms of Jeryd Mencken.”

Tom’s heart sank. “Greg.”

“I mean, like, I know it’s not great, Tom,” Greg said. “But I’ve been talking to Roman.”

“You haven’t allied yourself with the—” Tom broke off, and the phrase fascist incubus didn’t quite make it into the room with them.

“It’s non-ideological!” Greg said. “I’m just marking my lane, Tom, so to speak.”

Tom sighed. “I think that’s worse, you know. If you’re going to do a shitty thing, I think it’s worse if you don’t even believe in it.”

“Well, I think it’s smart,” Greg said, the words coming faster now. “And I think, like, I think you should do the same thing.”

Tom figured it out when he tried to make eye contact, and Greg just blushed and looked down.

“Roman sent you.”

Greg shuffled, still hovering in the doorway.

“He, uh, he might have kind of made some hint… suggestions.”

“Right,” Tom said.

Greg, the cartoon animal brandishing baby’s first moral compass, wandering off the path because the wolf had promised him a pretty patch of flowers.

“I just think it makes sense,” Greg said. “Because then Roman gets the thing that he wants the most, and America gets the thing that the most Americans want. Right?”

“I don’t know, Greg,” Tom said. “I don’t know if people should always get what they want.”

“But, like, you would get the company. With Shiv. And then I think, like, you could do whatever you wanted.”

They were just circling round and round, the way Tom usually did with Shiv. The bodies were piling up already, because the Roys and their customers drank them. But they would pile up even faster if Mencken got to do what he wanted to do.

What Greg wanted him to do, apparently. Maybe even what Tom wanted him to do.

(And God, Tom wasn’t even anywhere near the guy right now, and it was like he was still there, doing that trick of his where all of the things that Tom wanted but didn’t want to want would just come bubbling up to the surface anyway.)

“You’re playing with fire,” Tom told Greg. “You have a very exposed belly here, and platoons of asshole knights in full suits of armor are charging you on horseback from all directions.”

Greg shook his head. “Roman swore he wouldn’t turn me if I didn’t want him to.”

“I see.”

Clean belly, filthy hands.

“Lots of companies, you know, use people,” Greg said. “Like, their labor or their bodies or whatever. And Waystar already does, anyways.”

He disappeared from Tom’s office, his noisy breathing fading out as he turned the corner.

Tom rested his head on his hands.

He meant to stay there just for a moment, but one thing led to another, and when he opened his eyes again the office was dark. He stood and waved his hands in the air, and the motion-sensor lights flickered back on.

He stretched out his back, groaning. He was too old to be sleeping all hunched over like that, no lumbar support or anything. His mouth was bone-dry.

He went down the hall to the shitty little kitchen on his floor, desperate for a glass of water.

Locked.

There was a bathroom around the corner, he knew. It wouldn’t be locked, even after hours, and the water that came out of the taps in there was perfectly drinkable. It was irrational to avoid it.

Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to go inside. He turned the other way instead, his feet finding the elevator bank. The C-suite had a swanky kitchen all to themselves, the next floor up. He was pretty sure it would still be open.

He really needed to stop fucking walking into rooms without knocking first.

The kitchen was all stainless steel and polished granite, the kind of room that made a meal look more like a surgery. In this case, though, the meal more or less was a surgery.

In the middle of the sleek kitchen island, a disembodied set of lungs was splayed out, open and exposed and pink. The heart was still attached in the center, so fresh it was practically quivering, a pair of unmistakably human figures hunched over it.

A tiny noise escaped Tom’s throat, involuntary, and the two heads whipped up in unison to look at him.

Roman and Gerri, eyes glazed, blood dribbling down their chins and spattering onto the floor around their feet.

“Oh, thank God,” Roman said, recognizing that it was only Tom, and didn’t even bother retracting his fangs. “Hey, Ger, want the left atrium?”

They had threaded straws into the severed ends of the blood vessels still protruding from the heart, Tom realized. They were sucking the muscle dry, weaponizing its own anatomy against it.

The trachea flopped uselessly on the countertop, no living creature left on its other end to give it voice.

“Why keep the lungs?” Tom asked weakly, unsure whether there was an answer that could even come close to satisfying him.

Gerri looked up at him again. There was one smear of blood in her hair, like she was a rebellious teenager who’d just discovered the dye aisle at her local CVS.

She shrugged, repositioning her straw. “It’s a pain in the ass to detach them.”

Tom opened his mouth, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, and neither of them was paying him the slightest bit of attention any longer, anyway.

He crossed the kitchen silently and got himself a glass of water. Then he drank it without looking at the gory tableau spread out before him.

It wasn’t until he’d gotten home that it even occurred to him to wonder where the rest of the body had gone.

***

The winter solstice fell on December 20^th that year, and the ceremony was scheduled for solar midnight on the dot. It would be held beneath Maesbury’s office building.

Tom woke up that morning with such a jolt, it was as though he had been subjected to an electric shock. He was entirely too aware of the thump of his heartbeat in his chest, his ears, his clenched fists.

He ate a granola bar, and then remembered this might be the last granola bar he ever enjoyed.

He ate another.

Shiv was in front of the TV, a tall glass of blood mostly forgotten beside her. It was fresh-squeezed, which meant—yes, the half-bathroom’s door was tightly closed, the gore safely contained within it.

Tom ate a third granola bar, and Shiv sipped her blood.

They went for a stroll through Central Park, Tom taking care not to retrace the path he had walked with Stewy a few weeks back. It was so cold out, even Shiv had bundled up, and as he held her hand through their layers of fleecy gloves, it was impossible to tell whose skin was dead and whose was alive.

He squeezed her fingers and chose to remember her from this side of eternity, where everything mattered to him because there wasn’t enough of it. He chose to believe she was remembering him this way, too. He didn’t ask.

“You know what you have to do,” she said, and he nodded, and they didn’t say anything else about it.

The whole clan showed up for the ceremony: Logan; Shiv and her brothers; Mencken; and even Frank and Gerri, who had to be there for legal reasons. Greg hadn’t been invited on the grounds of being human, and Marcia had declined to attend in protest of Mencken’s general moral repugnance.

Stewy met them outside the Maesbury building, a lone figure standing outside in the freezing night. He wasn’t even wearing a coat, though he appeared entirely indifferent to the bitter wind.

They processed into the warm, empty lobby and stood disoriented for a moment. Then Stewy led them through an inconspicuous side door, and down a winding staircase hewn into the building’s stone foundations. There were wall sconces every 15 or 20 steps down, and a few of them flickered to life as Stewy passed, but mostly they were either dead or broken.

It took a long time to reach the bottom of the staircase. Tom was behind Kendall, who walked nearly in lockstep with Stewy; after the three of them came Shiv, and then Connor and Logan, with Roman and Gerri and Mencken on their tail, and Frank bringing up the rear. Tom could hear Logan wheezing a few times, but it was too dark, and the stairwell was too dramatically twisty, to look back.

The room at the bottom of the stairs was a letdown.

As a sophomore in high school, Tom had once gotten caught cutting class, and as punishment had been forced to participate in the drama club’s production of Bacchae. They put it on in the black-box theater, an ugly little cinderblock room that appealed exclusively to people who thought that breaking the fourth wall was the apotheosis of the dramatic arts.

Stepping into the Maesbury basement more than three decades later, Tom had to fight the sudden urge to start reciting his lines all over again. The place was snug, and simple: four walls, a ceiling, and a floor, all painted matte black. There was no furniture. Two recessed ceiling lights provided the only illumination.

Sandy was waiting for them, along with a few suits. Frank and Gerri peeled off from the group to join the Maesbury reps, pulling out paperwork and reading glasses and swapping shop-talk. The family fanned out along the perimeter of the room.

“Over here,” Logan told Tom, steering him into the middle of the floor.

Tom obeyed silently, feeling distinctly exposed as he stood there alone.

There was a shuffle from Gerri and one of the Maesbury lawyers, and then their heads nodded, and the paperwork made its way into Sandy’s hands.

Sandy cleared his throat and stepped into the middle of the room, facing Tom. A bit of legalese flew back and forth.

“And is the human element willing?” Sandy asked.

Tom looked past him at them all: Kendall, shoulder-to-shoulder with Stewy; Roman, preening for Mencken; Shiv, now at Logan’s right hand. She gazed back at him.

Tom swallowed and fixed his eyes on Sandy’s.

“Yes.”

There was an audible reaction around the room, but Tom didn’t parse out the sounds. He kept his focus on Sandy. The decision was made.

Sandy nodded, and added his signature to the paperwork in his hand. He passed it off to one of the suits. Then he stepped back into the middle of the room with Tom.

There was a long, long pause. Tom thought he might pass out.

Sandy’s face went utterly blank, and then the faintest tinge of anger surfaced. Tom’s stomach turned.

“Liar,” Sandy said.

“I—what?” Tom choked out, his voice cracking.

“Liar,” Sandy repeated. He sighed and turned, addressing the rest of the room. “The Roys have brought an unwilling participant. The ceremony may not commence.”

“No,” Tom said, looking about desperately. “Wait. I’m willing!”

“He is not,” Sandy said, his voice flat. “The contract is signed, and the Roys have broken it.”

He took a step toward Tom, and then another, and then everything went black.

***

“Hi, honey.”

Tom awoke to the feeling of a hand on his forehead, warm and soft and comforting. He opened his eyes.

“Hi, Shiv,” he said, his voice creaky with disuse. He coughed a little.

“Here.” She handed him a cup, and he sipped from it without looking.

The liquid was warm, too. Neutral in its flavor and smell, and yet—he knew in a flash—not water.

He lowered the cup and saw the thick, tell-tale crimson of fresh blood.

He nearly spat it out, but then his throat convulsed, and the blood slid down past his tongue and into his stomach, and the deed was done.

Shiv took the cup back and placed it on his bedside table. Her touch was gentle, but firm.

“What—what happened?”

She pursed her lips. “You tried to make the deal, but you weren’t really willing. The ceremony couldn’t go through.”

“I remember that,” Tom said, and he expected a flush in his cheeks, but—nothing.

He would have to get used to that.

“Well,” Shiv continued, “Sandy was pretty fucking pissed. The contracts were all drawn up, so legally, he had a legitimate claim to your soul.”

“In what fucking court?” Tom said faintly.

She rolled her eyes. “We have courts, Tom. We’re bloodsuckers, not animals. Anyway, he tried to take your soul, but just to feed on it. He was going to kill you. So I offered him a swap, and he left you alone. But you were in pretty bad shape by that point, and I had to turn you myself. You’re one of us now.”

Despite it all, Tom was relieved. He took her hand. She still felt warm, which he supposed was really just because the two of them were the same temperature now.

Close enough.

He kissed her knuckles, and said, “Thank you.”

“You owe me one,” she said, her smile wrong somehow.

It took him a moment to sift through the rest of what she’d told him.

“You swapped someone,” he said slowly.

“I had to. Sandy would have killed you on the spot.”

“Who?” Tom asked, but he knew the answer. “Shiv, who’d you get to step up for me?”

A door swung open slowly, and Tom oriented himself for the first time. He was in Logan’s study, propped up in a sickbed. The adjoining bathroom was locked tight, a horrible shadow spreading along the crack beneath the door.

The person walking into the room was Greg.

Except that Tom knew, without even looking at him, that he wasn’t a person at all anymore.

“Hi, Tom.”

“He’s not a Roy,” Tom said desperately. “He’s a Hirsch.”

“He’s in the family,” Shiv murmured. “I got Sandy to agree that it was close enough.”

She stepped back a bit and let Greg take her place. He stood beside Tom’s bed, his usual nervous energy dampened, his expression flat. He wasn’t mouth-breathing any longer.

“Greg,” Tom said, trying to smile at him. “How are you feeling, buddy?”

“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Sort of like a long day at the office.”

“Oh,” Tom said faintly, and then, “You sacrificed yourself for me.”

“Yeah,” Greg said, frowning a little. “I guess I’m not totally sure why I would do that, though.”

“It’ll come back to him,” said a voice from the doorway, and Tom looked over to see Stewy, whose features flitted over that pitying expression again. “The first few hundred years are difficult, but the memories are still there. They just get buried for a while. There’s an awful lot to take in.”

“Oh,” Tom said again, his tone coming out hollow like Greg’s.

There was a pause as they all waited for someone else to say something, and then Shiv took up the mantle.

“Well, come downstairs,” she said, reaching for Tom’s hand. “It’s Christmas Day. Everyone’s here.”

Tom sat up, stretched out his legs, and stood, tottering. The transformation had taken a lot out of him.

He crossed the room, steadied himself. Greg and Stewy had gone out ahead.

“So the deal went through,” Tom said.

“Of course.” Shiv held the door open for him. “Dad’s thrilled. Waystar is saved. Now it’s time for the clean-up job.”

Tom made it to the top of the stairs, Shiv at his side, and surveyed the scene below.

Mencken and Logan, holding court on the couch, Roman caught in orbit around them both. Sandy, chatting with Gerri and Frank. Greg, drinking something far too expensive for him.

What did we do?

Kendall, his hair sopping wet, red around his mouth. Stewy, bored.

Everything glitzy and glimmering and beautiful, and all those crystal glasses full of deep rich blood.

What are we supposed to do now?

Tom thought that if his heart were still capable of beating, it would be thundering right now. He was grateful to be spared the sensation.