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of anyone, Costin would know what he was doing. Who the hell was she to know better?
    “Blood,” she said softly. “You’ll need my blood before you go. You’ll be stronger with it.”
    “Yes.” She thought she heard a hint of regret, anger at his weakness, and thankfulness in his voice, all at the same time. “I will be stronger with you in me.”
    As he left, she trailed up the stairs after him, hearing the vague ticking of every clock in the house counting down to when she’d have to let him go again.

FOUR
    LONDON BABYLON, CUSTODE MONITOR ROOM
    FAR under the earth, where the walls seemed to close in and rip at the skin with their darkness, a custode named Lilly was sitting at the monitors that allowed the keepers who were linked to this Underground to watch over London. She’d been here for hours, mainly to search the bank of tellys for Claudia—or “Claudius” or “Mrs. Jones” or whichever identity the old cow had assumed tonight. The vampire had simply gone off the Underground’s radar after escaping the clutches of the younger creatures, who had attacked their elder, ousting her from the community.
    The ruckus had all been due to Lilly, and she didn’t regret orchestrating Claudia’s banishment for even an instant. She would have loved to have done it herself, but for the vow she had taken upon activation into this holiest of holy positions.
    She had promised no harm to the Underground.
    Yet Lilly hadn’t harmed the community in the least by encouraging others to go after Claudia. It had been more a “beneficial maintenance maneuver,” and all Lilly had needed to do was utilize her tuner on one of the girls: Della, a budding, feral girl in her mid-teens who would make the finest of soldiers for the dragon.
    The tuner had implanted vivid stories—paranoia-inducing true nightmares of the vampires’ pasts—that had urged Della to share the tales with the rest of the higher vampire schoolgirls. Based on those visions, plus a suspicion that Claudia had been up to no good with their school chums who had gone missing over the years, the group had decided to attack the vampire who Lilly believed was the primary reason this Underground had gone to such crap. Claudia had a cancerous influence on the main master vampire, Mihas, who had once been quite the soldier himself, serving the dragon and their country with a blood- hungry ferocity that seemed to have disappeared with all Claudia’s soft indulgences.
    She had never been a good co-master, and Lilly was somewhat relieved that the vampire had disappeared into the London night without even a summons for custode aid.
    Even so, Lilly had turned to these monitor screens, which were mainly connected to the CCTV surveillance cameras round London, to track Claudia. Not that the vampire would have the stones to return and exact revenge on the Underground—she would never betray Mihas like that, Lilly suspected—but the custode wished to keep tabs on the community’s security, and Claudia bore watching.
    Concurrently, Lilly had been surveying the Underground itself, with the recruited lower-class girls lounging about their common areas and Mihas still engaged in one of his fantasy rooms with the group of upper-crust Queenshill schoolgirls who had decided to seduce him, no doubt intent on taking his attention off the missing Claudia. They were the same girls who had so fiercely thrown the co-master out of the Underground, and they had been at Mihas since last night.
    On a screen reflecting the goings-on in the “pirate suite,” with its timber and silks and mock ship cabin details, Lilly saw how the girls kept Mihas willingly captive, kissing and biting, using their tongues and giggles. In spite of youthful appearances, most of the vampires were actually far beyond a tender age, having been turned decades ago, and their experience showed. Lilly couldn’t help but notice that the newest class of schoolgirl vampires—the truly teenaged Della, Noreen, and