Prologue: The Flight

The champagne tasted like a memory I couldn't quite place.

I held the flute between two fingers — the glass cold against my skin, the bubbles rising in disciplined columns through the pale gold liquid — and let the first sip sit on my tongue. Fruity. Bright. The effervescence prickling against the roof of my mouth with the insistent delicacy of something that wanted to be noticed. It was pleasant enough, though it was nothing like the headiness of blood. Nothing ever was.

The cabin was empty save for the three of us. First class on a Singapore Airlines flight from Changi to Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino, fourteen hours of pressurised air and recycled oxygen and the particular hush of a space designed for people who paid enough to be left alone. The seats were pods — private, leather, the colour of cream left too long in the sun — and the lighting had been dimmed to the amber warmth of a room that was pretending it was evening regardless of what the sun was doing outside.

I watched the flight attendant pass — a woman in her late twenties, moving through the cabin in a figure-hugging sarong kebaya, the batik pattern catching the amber light and producing colours that shifted between teal and gold with each step. Her walk was professional, unhurried, the gait of someone who had learned to move through narrow spaces without touching anything.

"For the record, Chandrika, I think you would look devastating in one of those outfits," a male voice murmured to my left.

I lifted an eyebrow and gave my travelling companion a sidelong look. Companion was not the right word for him. I could use any number of more accurate terms — vampire (though not the same type as me), large man (he was approximately six feet and two inches of dense, athletic muscle, those long legs filling the space before him like a territorial claim, whereas I could fold my entire body into my seat with the compactness of a cat who had decided that smallness was a strategic advantage), or fellow person of South Asian heritage, though his particular brand of South Asian heritage and mine diverged in ways that were fundamental and irreconcilable.

But companion? No. At least, I wasn't a willing one. Not in every sense.

I was inclined to drive my thumbnail through the soft tissue of his throat — a response that two thousand years of existence had not dulled, the reflex of a creature whose primary survival strategy was violence applied with precision — when I noticed how the tips of his ears had reddened. He downed his champagne, his throat bobbing as he swallowed, the motion exposing the strong column of his neck in a way that was either brave or foolish given who he was sitting beside.

A compliment. A sincere one. And he was embarrassed by his own sincerity, but he had said it anyway.

All right. I shan't kill you for that remark. I'm too tired, and now I'm curious. What do you want with me?

"I prefer my salwar suits," I murmured instead. "Or a saree, when the occasion demands."

"Of course. Classics."

A different attendant approached — this one older, her uniform in hues of red and orange, the colours of seniority in the airline's hierarchy. Her eyes found me first, the assessment swift and professional: small woman, pale skin, dark hair, combat boots, no trouble expected.

"Miss Chandrika, is there anything else I can get for you?"

A gentle shake of my head, and those mascara-lined eyes migrated to my companion. "And you, Mr Verma?"

Oh, her finely-honed charms were no match against his. Hari returned her flirtatious smile — the full force of it, the smile that involved the eyes and the jaw and the particular architecture of a face that had been designed by genetics and centuries of selective breeding to be devastatingly attractive — and her rouged cheeks bloomed a delicate pink that had nothing to do with cosmetics.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Show off.

"I'll have another one, please," he requested, handing his long-stem glass over with the casual grace of a man who was accustomed to being served and had the decency to be polite about it.

"Certainly, Mr Verma."

As she retreated, I asked, "Are you that thirsty, Hari?"

He huffed. "Nervous."

"You?" I scoffed. "Why? We're no longer in danger. At least, not for the time being."

"No, we aren't. Thank the gods for that."

I jutted my chin toward the seats behind us. "Your friend, Shastriji, is fine. I believe she's fallen asleep again."

"She's not my friend," he answered, his face hardening — the warmth draining from his expression the way colour drains from a sky before a storm. "She's the one who dragged me from my office in Mumbai to Singapore." His dark eyes met mine, and in them I saw the particular intensity of a man who had been waiting for this moment with the patience of someone who understood that patience was not passive but strategic. "To find you."

My mouth parted to speak, but he cut me off. "But you are right. We're safe now." The darkness flitted away, replaced by a shy smile that emerged from his face like a lamp being uncovered. "I'm nervous because I'm finally sitting here. With you. A captive audience. You can't run from me here."

That unsettled me. More than I wanted to admit. And it told me precisely what he wanted. Either there was something he had to say that he needed me to hear, or—

He wanted me to tell him things. Things that only I knew.

And knowing who he was — the great-grandson of a vampire I had known and loved for centuries — I could guess which things he wanted.

He was right. I wanted to run. But I couldn't, and I refused to. So I hedged and laughed instead. "Here I thought you were nervous because you were worried I'd bite or maul you, or do any number of untold heinous things to you, given my past and our—" I gestured between us, at the space that contained our differences the way a river contains its current: visibly, forcefully, with the constant threat of overflow. "—differences."

He barked a laugh — a sound that came from deep in his chest and filled the cabin with a warmth that the ambient lighting was only pretending to provide. "We have our differences, surely. But I know you better than you think. If you wanted to maul or bite me, you'd have done it already. Admit it — you're just as curious about me as I am about you."

Damn. He had me there.

I was curious. Unhealthily so. I couldn't help myself. I was drawn to him for reasons I had not yet catalogued, and I allowed myself to consider them as the attendant returned with Hari's second champagne and the cabin settled into the particular quiet of a space where two people were about to have a conversation that would change the shape of everything.

The most obvious thing about him was how much of a killer he probably was. That is, if one ignored the expensive linen kurta he wore beneath a tailored blazer, the dress trousers and polished Oxford shoes, all of which made him look like he had stepped out of a boardroom in Lower Parel where the decisions involved crores of rupees and the handshakes involved the kind of power that ordinary people never touched.

He had the arms of a killer. His sleeves were pushed up to the elbows, exposing the thick, corded muscles of his forearms, which flexed with even the slightest movement — reaching for his glass, adjusting his seat, the micro-gestures that most people performed unconsciously but that I catalogued with the professional attention of a predator assessing another predator. His thighs strained against the fabric of his trousers, the bulk of them obvious even in the dim cabin lighting.

It made me wonder when Hari had last taken another life. It made me think of the last time I had done so. Once, unintentionally, a mere two years ago. And before that — over a hundred years ago, during the upheaval of the Independence movement, when the chaos of a nation being born provided cover for actions that would have been noticed in quieter times.

Then again, in this age, most vampires did not resort to violence. It was needless and cruel, and a sentiment that most of us held close — the ethical position of creatures who had lived long enough to understand that killing was easy and living with the killing was the hard part.

Truth be told, I was probably more of a killer than Hari. I did not have his build and obvious strength. I could fit all five feet and two inches of me into this luxurious seat. Cross-legged. And though I did not look older than twenty-five — the age at which my human body had been arrested, frozen, preserved in the amber of a transformation that had occurred in the third century BCE, in the court of Chandragupta Maurya, where a visitor from the western mountains had offered me a cup of something that tasted of iron and starlight and had changed the fundamental nature of my biology — I had lived over two thousand years.

I had literally watched the rise and fall of empires. The Mauryas. The Guptas. The Mughals. The British. I had stood in the shadows of Pataliputra when it was the greatest city in the world. I had walked the streets of Varanasi when the ghats were being built. I had been in Calcutta when the last British ship left the harbour, and I had felt nothing — not triumph, not relief, just the exhaustion of a woman who had seen too many flags raised and lowered to believe that any of them meant anything permanent.

"Did I mention," Hari said, settling into his seat with a satisfied sigh, "that I'm a bit of a collector of stories?"

I knew where this was going. He wanted my story. The story of a two-thousand-year-old Hybrid vampire who had been made, not born, who carried in her blood the memory of a transformation that predated his entire bloodline by centuries.

"No, you have not," I responded, gesturing to the heavy platinum watch on his exposed wrist. "I gather you've amassed a fortune for yourself, but so have many of us who live for centuries and hide in plain sight among humans. Although — that wasn't the point of your question."

"No," he admitted. "It wasn't."

"I won't give you my story," I said, crossing my arms — the defensive gesture of a woman who had been defending herself for two millennia and had refined the posture to an art. "There's nothing to tell."

His face fell. The display of emotion amazed me — the openness of it, the willingness to be visibly disappointed. How could he have lived so long this way? Unless it was because of me. My proximity. The effect I had on people who had known of me for a long time. Perhaps he had — idolised me.

You don't know me*, I thought. *And I don't know you.

He collected himself. "Perhaps I don't want your story."

I shot him a look.

"Perhaps I want Sarita's."

The name hit me like a hand to the sternum — a physical impact that I absorbed without flinching because two thousand years had taught me to absorb everything without flinching, even the things that deserved a flinch.

Sarita. The human woman. The one who had changed everything.

"Sarita's fine," I said.

Is she?

His dark-brown eyes held mine, and he mirrored my own doubts as he said, "We're flying toward danger, Chandrika. Both of us know that. Before we land, I need to understand what happened. All of it. From the beginning."

I looked at the window. Thirty-seven thousand feet below, the Indian Ocean was invisible in the darkness — a vast, black absence that separated the world I was leaving from the world I was approaching. Somewhere down there, beneath the water and the distance, was the truth of what had happened. The boy. The woman. The vampire who had complicated everything. And the choice I had made that had brought me here, to this seat, on this plane, beside this man who was asking for a story that I did not want to tell.

"Fine," I said. The word tasted of surrender — bitter, metallic, the flavour of a decision made not from willingness but from the understanding that some stories insist on being told, and the only question is whether you tell them or they tell themselves. "But I'm starting from the beginning. And the beginning is not where you think it is."

Hari leaned forward. The cabin was silent except for the white noise of the engines and the barely perceptible hum of a machine carrying us through the sky at nine hundred kilometres per hour. The champagne bubbles continued their disciplined ascent. The attendant was nowhere to be seen.

I took a breath — unnecessary, technically, since my lungs had not required oxygen for two thousand years, but the gesture was a remnant of humanity that I had never been willing to abandon — and began.

"It started with a boy," I said. "A boy who shouldn't have existed."