Paris herself had changed during the last five years, during which Giordan had been in Morocco. Now, his City of Light roiled with tension and fear. Nerves crackled on the very rues, unease simmered in the Seine—for The Terror lived and seeped into every corner of the city. It had begun with the execution of the king by guillotine—and then shortly after, his wife Marie Antoinette, sniffing vials of her personal perfume tucked inside her bodice, met the same fate. And now every day, as Robespierre and his cronies struggled to maintain the burgeoning revolution, more and more people were dragged under the shining silver blade and relieved of their heads.

One who was required to live on the lifeblood of man—or whatever other living being one chose—might find it convenient that the mortals in Paris were being slaughtered in great numbers (for it wasn’t only the Widow—the guillotine—that caused their demise; there were shootings and beatings and other random murders fueled by desperation and suspicion), for it certainly provided a vast opportunity for sustenance. But while Giordan Cale had no qualms about killing in general, he found such rampant, widespread actions distasteful and unnecessarily violent.

This was, apparently, only one of the many ways in which he and Cezar Moldavi differed.

In fact, there were painfully few ways in which he and Cezar Moldavi were in agreement. After spending only a brief time with a bottle of excellent wine (which Giordan had sent over) and discussing a possible investment with Moldavi, Giordan came to the conclusion that his friend Dimitri, known as the Earl of Corvindale across the Channel in England, was being kind when he described Moldavi as being the lowest form of a bollocks-licking, bitch-in-heat, Lucifer’s-cock-biting bastard.