“Welcome to Spindrift. Here’s what you need to know,” Jin had said to the new recruit before they opened that morning. “At seven bells, the tearoom doors lock shut. No patrons in, everyone out. No exceptions, no matter how dashing the smile. Slide the shutters over the glass and come round to the back. Now, shuffle this bookcase and take down those frames. Will you look at that, the bloodhouse is nearly open for business.”
The new girl shivered. Jin couldn’t blame her.
“Make your way to the booths,” he continued. He had enough to do, but no one else could show her the workings better than the one who had made it all, bit by bit, idea by idea. “Take that vase off. Set it on the table that unfolds from the right. Come back to the shelf, reach for the latches on either side, and a bed will unfold. Better if you don’t think about what happens in here, eh? Unless that’s your thing.” He winked. “Step out. That gap between the stall wall? Reach in, pull out the door, angle it closed.”
He paused to take in her awe. “Now our booth is a bedroom. Do it again, and again, and again. Oh, and make sure you have your uniforms ready. One’s for serving our prim, aristocratic patrons, and the other’s a little more alluring for our vampire friends who come from all walks of life.”
She followed him out to the floor, where the tables were set with small bowls of depleting sugar cubes and cream pots to be cleaned. The smell of tea clung to the air. Jin plucked a tray from a passing server and shoved it in the new girl’s hands, sweeping the ceramics onto it.
“Every other table folds away. First in half, then directly into the floor, like so. Slide the chairs to the wall and while you’re there, push on this lever and sit back—a settee will come out and meet you.”
Jin fell back, slipping through air as the sofa unfolded and cocooned him in a plush cushion. He propped up his legs and lifted his eyebrows. “That’s Spindrift. Tearoom by light, bloodhouse by dark.”
Now, hours later, it was time to do the reverse.
As the clock tower struck two, Jin and Arthie burst through the back doors of Spindrift, sign as sharp as its owner, bricks as bright as her ambition. The place couldn’t have been more alive. Jin paused as he always did, allowing himself to savor its warm embrace.
Arthie glanced at her pocket watch. “Seventeen minutes until the peace posse arrives.”
They only needed nine. Four to clear the floor and five to transform the place. They had this mastered.
The lights were down low, softening the edges to a bewitching glow over the midnight crowd: the undead who came to feast and the blood merchants who came to get paid. The crew bustled among tables, decanters glittering as they topped off teacups full of red. Vampires lounged, their conversations hushed, laughter dulcet and deep. Some relaxed with the day’s papers while others converged near the dark wainscot walls, slips of shadow against the floral damask decorating the upper half. At the far end, a vampire and a blood merchant tucked into one of the private rooms as another pair exited the room beside it.
These weren’t the vampires with exclusive access to the elite society of snobbery known as the Athereum, but they dressed and acted as if they were lords and ladies anyway, and it made Jin even more proud of Spindrift and the allure he and Arthie had created.
Spindrift was more than a business. It was a safe place, and not just for their crew of orphans and castaways. In Ettenia, vampires had lived for decades in relative secrecy, indistinguishable from the living, until a massacre had thrown their existence into sudden blinding light.
Twenty years ago, the Wolf of White Roaring brutalized the streets, ripping out throats until rivulets of red ran down the district. Though the Wolf did not drink from his victims so much as he mauled them, survivors spoke of fangs and a scarlet stare. He was a vampire, though no one had known at the time, and it was strange they’d never found the one responsible.
“Almost as if the attack had been created for a purpose,” Arthie would sometimes say.
After all, fear became hate when it festered long enough. The world always teemed with darkness, Ettenia had just given it a new name.
A far from difficult task, for vampires were predators to begin with and it was almost too easy. A mysterious man murdering women for hire? Blame it on vampires. A woman who up and decided to kill her cheating husband? She had to be undead. It didn’t matter if the majority of vampires acted with decorum, and though the richer vampires could assimilate into high society with no one the wiser, the commonalty had no place but the shadows and, thus, rare access to blood.
Vampires might have to exercise restraint when feeding so as not to drain their marks, but they weren’t rabid. They didn’t go on killing sprees when they could quietly slip their fangs into their victims for a treat. The Wolf of White Roaring, at the time of his attack, was different—a half vampire, torn between the living and the dead.
Traditionally, a vampire was born when a person on the brink of death ingested vampire blood. Whether they were exsanguinated by an undead or died of other means, the process was the same: Drink an adequate amount of vampire blood in those precious seconds, and the deed was done.
Half vampires were different. They were fed vampire blood while they were still alive, and often against their will, giving them all the energy of the living and then some, enough to unleash their pain upon the innocent without even realizing it.
They were weaker than their counterparts, but still able to become full vampires the same way humans could. Both full and half vampires drank blood to survive, both bore no reflection in a mirror. Full vampires cast no shadow, half ones did. Unlike full vampires who were frozen at the age they were turned, half vampires matured at a pace much slower than humans until they eventually stopped.
Regardless, here in Spindrift, vampires could be themselves for a while. Jin struck his umbrella on the floorboards, drawing the room’s attention. Crimson eyes turned his way, the sign of vampires who had gorged their fill.
“Wrap it up,” Arthie announced. “Spindrift closes in ten.”
The din rose to a soft buzz. Vampires were a quiet lot, fazed by little. With heightened hearing and increased speed, it only made sense. Several flagged down last-minute teacups of blood—many asking for Jin’s signature coconut-blood blend, which Spindrift had been out of for quite some time—and others departed with satisfied sighs, retracted fangs, and chaste kisses to the backs of one another’s hands.
Jin and Arthie got to work.
“You want to tell me what that was back there at Matteo Andoni’s house?” Jin asked her, dragging the shutters down.
She spotted a dark spill and tossed someone a mop. “You shot him.”
“Because you used the tone,” Jin said, and Arthie tipped her head at one of their more popular and scantily dressed blood merchants.
Though most blood merchants filled large glass syringes and called it a day, this one offered her services in the private rooms, where a vampire could drink directly from the source. The euphoria from a vampire’s fangs and whatever else transpired in a room had its perks, Jin supposed.
“What tone?” Arthie asked, picking up a decanter. Her eyes reflected the scarlet of its contents.
Jin lifted his eyebrows. “The one that says, ‘Jin, please shoot the pretty man.’”
“Well then, you can’t blame me for your lack of morales.”
“Morals. The word you’re looking for—”
“You know I can say all that and more in two other languages, both of which have far more letters than Ettenian, so don’t patronize me, Jin,” she snapped. He jerked back and paused. Arthie paused too before grabbing a rag. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Matteo really has you riled up, doesn’t he?” Jin asked, holding in a laugh. It was cute, he had to admit, Arthie being all worked up because Matteo had flaunted a dimple and taunted her with the suggestion of a love story.
She snapped her pocket watch closed with a muttered riled.
Jin clapped his hands and addressed the room. “Sorry to cut the night short, good friends, but if you would kindly leave the premises, I would be much obliged.”
Chairs were pushed back, coins clinked. The last of the vampires stepped through the back doors with nods, waves, and hat tips. Everyone had a heartbeat, a flush to their skin. Well-fed vampires were as close to living as they could get.
It took three minutes and forty-nine seconds for the floor to clear, and then the true chaos erupted.
“Reni!” Arthie yelled. “Tea!”
Reni brewed good tea. Always the right steep, the perfect shade. It was the only reason Arthie let him wander the floor during morning hours, considering he preferred blood himself. An odd fellow. Fresh kettles thudded onto stovetops, ready ones whistled, and before long, steady hands were pouring steaming tea into bowls to mask the stench of blood.
It was a rhythm in Jin’s veins.
“Pick up the pace,” Arthie shouted, sliding the bookcase in place and sealing the back door. “Leave that, unlock the front. Chester, the glasses. You three get in uniform, and the rest of you out of sight.”
Spindrift being a bloodhouse was no secret. White Roaring knew it. The crew knew it. Every member of the Horned Guard knew it. The difference was in the proof: None existed. Except for that syringe Matteo had, of course. Jin still didn’t know how he’d managed to pilfer it. Only the crew was allowed to handle the supplies used for bloodletting, and they were instructed to do so with care and precaution.
“Felix, fetch the mirrors,” Arthie ordered as Jin passed her the tubes full of blood and sterilized bundles of surgical instruments to tuck underneath the floorboards in the front.
Every few weeks, the Horned Guard would try something new: elaborate raids, claiming incorrect paperwork to stall shipments of tea and coconuts, all but defaming Spindrift in the newspapers.
“Maybe we ought to hide your pistol,” Jin suggested, wiping down the counter. Sure, everyone knew about it, but there was a difference between knowing about it and having it shoved in your face. He glanced at its grip etched in black filigree that gave it an ethereal look, once smeared with the fingerprints of those who had tried to pull it free using chisels and axes and everything in between.
Really, all they’d needed were the small hands of a small girl from a small island far, far away. A girl who had been wronged, cheated, stolen.
Arthie tucked away the night’s invoices and looked at him like he’d dropped his wits on the run here. “They’re regular old guards, Jin. Since when are we afraid of them?”
But Matteo’s words had struck a little too close. Something about this night had riled him too, and it wasn’t the artist’s dimple.
“They send a higher-ranked guard with every new raid,” he said.
Arthie did that thing with her face, a dismissal that pulled back one side of her mouth. “Don’t start doubting your handiwork now.”
Everyone took the slip, slide, and click transformation of Spindrift for granted. Not Arthie. She never forgot the weeks it took to make it work, and the strain it had put on Jin. Arthie didn’t forget anything.
When Jin was seven he’d wished for a sister. When he was eleven Arthie had pulled him out of death’s embrace. Jin still remembered squinting up at her ratty and dirty figure, the kind of person his father, dressed in the finest wool and the shiniest shoes, would point out to him from the carriage window and say, “See, these are the people you will help one day, little heron.”
His father hadn’t been there to witness the roles reversed.
She was, simply put, a tempest in a bottle, tiny and simmering and ready to obliterate. White Roaring had whittled her sharp as a blade and her wits just the same.
How far she’d come from the girl in rags to a master in a tailored suit, baker boy hat pulled over the swoops of her mauve hair, a pinstripe waistcoat snug over her crisp shirt, cuffs neat, collar popped, suit jacket always open because I’m no straightlace. The jacket matched the belt slung low and angled on her hips, pistol on full display.
“Any news on the coconut?” Arthie asked when Jin grabbed a coir brush for a stubborn patch of blood. Coconut husks really did make the best brushes.
Spindrift’s imports consisted of tea and coconuts from Arthie’s homeland of Ceylan, but with a blight affecting crops across the island, they hadn’t replenished their coconut stores in months.
Jin shook his head. He could have sworn the light in her eyes dimmed a little as she rearranged their various tins of loose-leaf tea, from plain and robust black teas to delicate white teas and curated blends infused with fruit and other flavors—though Arthie refused to brew any atrocity at Spindrift that wasn’t truly tea, like chamomile or peppermint.
“At least our tea’s safe, eh?” he said. Without it, they’d have no tearoom. Coconut, on the other hand, they only used to enhance the experience of the bloodhouse. “And still no word from our palace snitchers. Pol heard today that they might be on lockdown.”
They had a network of maids and stewards and household staff willing to trade whispers for coin but hadn’t heard from anyone in the palace in nearly two weeks.
“The palace might be on lockdown?” Arthie asked, lifting her brows in surprise.
Jin nodded. He didn’t know if that meant the Ram was worried about someone getting in or out.
“They’re almost here!” the lookout shouted over the ruckus of sliding tables and clinking teacups. Jin tensed.
“Dulce periculum, brother,” Arthie reminded him, holding up her left arm.
He knocked the back of his right hand against the back of hers. Their knuckles rapped. “We were made for trouble, you and me.”
Figures silhouetted through the frosted glass of Spindrift’s doors as the last settee folded into the wall and the rest of the crew disappeared. Jin yanked up the flip-top table and stepped behind it. Arthie was in front of him.
The doors flew open without a knock, and five uniformed guards stepped inside. The outline of a head with wicked horns was emblazoned on their breasts in silver thread. The badge of the Ram, Ettenia’s latest masked monarch.
A server scampered forward. “Hello, sirs. Can I interest you in a cup of White Roaring’s best tea? Royal Ettenian’s my favorite.”
The guards looked perplexed. No self-respecting tearoom would be open this late, but Arthie liked to swamp them, get the men a little dazed and distracted, taunt them with what they already knew—especially when the alternative was awkward silence.
“Try the Ceylani Supreme. Best tea in the country, really,” another crew member called, looking up from the sink. “Never mind the capital.”
“Always go with the Crimson Gem myself,” said a third, leaning close. “Nothing beats a good spiced pekoe.”
If Arthie was a tea, that was what she would be. It was brewed with care and steeped with just the right amount of spices that brought out earthy, smoky undertones as the leaves unfolded. It demanded perfection, conferred the best, and punished anything that wasn’t with downright bitterness.
“Gentlemen.” She inclined her head on cue. Jin could only see the back of Arthie’s mauve head, but he knew her smile was the edge of a razor. “Noise complaint? I understand the clinking of teacups can be a little … aggressive at two in the morning. Always a lot to clean and prepare for our morning guests.”
The one in charge of the lot puffed out his chest and stomped closer. His livery was a light gray and stood in contrast to the solid black of the others. If only he knew that every last bit of proof the clods needed was underneath the floorboards at his feet. “You think you’re a king, Casimir. Defying the law.”
“Did you hear that, Jin? I’m King Arthie now.” She turned back to the guards. “Laws enacted by men like you scrawling words they believe they might understand? Laws vilifying anyone who isn’t as peaky as you?” She leaned back, slinging a hand across the bar top. He really did look peaky in the light: pale and an almost sickly white. “No, Sergeant. Can’t defy a law that doesn’t include me.”
She was right. Ettenian laws were created for the white man, usually at the expense of anyone who didn’t share their pallor. This was how someone like Matteo Andoni could live a markedly different life than someone like Arthie.
The sergeant’s gaze lit up eagerly. “Touchy subject, is it? Having trouble keeping up with rent, I heard. That’s the problem when folk like you come to a place where we have rules. I hear it’s only a matter of time before they evict you and your lot.”
Jin’s brow furrowed. They made every payment for the building—on time.
“Time to get your ears cleaned then,” Arthie said, betraying nothing.
“Then why do you look like you want to kill me?” the sergeant asked with a smirk.
“Oh, that’s just my face,” Arthie replied. “One gets a taste for blood when you have to lick your own wounds, you see.”
The sergeant stared for a minute, very likely trying to find something to say, before he jerked his head at the others. “Start looking.”
Jin flinched as a table and chair struck the far wall, followed by several stools. The men treated the tearoom like a pen to play in, tearing up the floors near the private rooms that were now secluded booths, one of them ducking his head and coming up empty.
“I didn’t say ruin the place,” the sergeant said tiredly. “If you’re going to pull up the floors, find wherever it’s hollow.”
“How considerate,” Jin commented, and lowered his voice to ask Arthie, “What’s he on about us being behind on payments?”
Arthie said nothing. Something shattered.
Jin sighed and lifted his chin to the men ransacking the place. “Need some help over there?”
With a sneer, one of them crouched by the front doors and rapped his knuckles on the wood. Even here behind the counter, Jin could hear that damning echo.
The sergeant looked to Arthie.
Arthie looked back. “Have at it. I won’t stop you.”
Jin wanted to stop him. He wanted his life unscathed. He wanted Spindrift unscathed, and they were the same thing. The sergeant wedged his knife beneath the worn floorboards.
“Blow switch two,” Arthie murmured to Jin.
Matteo Andoni had clearly shaken her if she thought that would tip anything in their favor. Blowing a bulb was the oldest trick in the book. The silliest. The most amateur.
“Jin,” she bit out.
One of these days she was going to get him killed, and he’d be too dead to whine about it.
He pressed down on the faulty power switch he had long ago put together under the counter, cursing a stray spark. Above them, one of the many suspended bulbs popped and hissed. The men looked up as the light bloomed brighter and made an alarming buzzing noise before it shattered, raining glass down on them. The length of wire swayed, bereft, and the sergeant shook the shards off and returned to work.
Some bloody good that did. The light had dimmed the space, nothing else.
“Patience, Jin,” Arthie said when he glanced at her with exasperation. To the men, she said casually, “Apologies. You know how it is on this side of White Roaring. Power can be quite fickle around here.”
This was the side of White Roaring that society had discarded, where the sound of a gunshot was as commonplace as a horse’s whinny. Spindrift sat on the edge of it, half outcast, half gentry, rising from the rubble of its surroundings through sheer force of will. With every new secret a patron let slip, Arthie tucked some official or another into her arsenal, turning the slums into a kingdom of their own with Spindrift as their crown.
And the Ram, as the increasing number of raids made clear, was painfully aware of it.
Yet, with the guards seconds away from enough proof to hang them all, Arthie had never looked more at ease.
The sergeant yanked the floorboard out of place. There was a long pause and a murmur before he and the others rose, and Jin saw that the hollow beneath the floorboard was … hollow. Not a syringe or blood vial in sight, though he had watched Arthie putting both down that very hole mere moments ago.
“Seems you lost a good night’s sleep over nothing,” Jin goaded, setting his chin in his hands.
“Told you,” one of the Horned Guards said, yawning loudly.
The sergeant shot him a dirty look and fixed the same on Arthie. “You think you’re—”
Arthie cut him short by swinging open the door. “Whatever you’re about to say, Sergeant, I don’t think it, I know it.”
Power was indeed fickle, and in the ever-changing landscape of White Roaring, the Casimirs were untouchable.