Making every effort to keep his clothes clean, he wriggled free. If his luck held, he’d soon be meeting with the Excelsior—the highest authority in all of the Vampire Executive International Network—to reveal the immense secret Menessos and his court witch were hiding. Heldridge didn’t want to be discredited by arriving covered in cobwebs and grime. It was bad enough that he would smell of moist earth and old death.

He trudged toward the Congressional Cemetery gates. Washington, D.C.’s persistent rain had made a monstrous marsh of the ground—it sucked at his every muddy step.

Heldridge soon traded the mucky path for a solid sidewalk. He couldn’t meet the Excelsior with filth on his shoes, so he stopped and kicked a homeless man curled in a storefront alcove. When the man groaned and sat up, Heldridge showed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Get the mud off my shoes.”

The homeless man twisted onto his knees and shrugged out of his jacket. He tugged off his shirt and wiped the shoes with it, exposing his emaciated body to the rain and cold. When he’d finished, Heldridge inspected the job and walked away with the money still in his hand.

“Hey,” the homeless man cried, scrambling to his feet.

Heldridge wadded the cash and tossed it over his shoulder. He laughed as the man scampered into the rain to claim the paper before it was swept down the gutter and into the storm drain.

Hunger gnawed at him, but he dared not try to feed at the local blood bar; that was exactly what the area vampires would expect him to do. Instead of risking recognition and capture, he would feed unlawfully.

In an alley a few blocks away, Heldridge sated his hunger with a mesmerized donor in a dapper hat. It was illegal and dangerous, but this risk was necessary.

As he thought of how easily he had fed for the last decade at his own bar—the Blood Culture, which catered to the vampires of Cleveland—his outrage swelled.