Cold seeped into Alexei from the stone pillar he pressed his back against. Entrenched in shadow, he waited like a lion in the brush for his prey. Humans walked up and down the steps into the New Harbour Museum of Fine Art in a steady stream, but they were on a frequency Alexei wasn't tuned in to. He was hunting something far more dangerous.

  The sea of undulating umbrellas on the street below made it difficult to spot him, but the Wolf's eyes had never been his greatest asset. The rich aroma of bay laurel, salt, and smoke hit Alexei's palate long before the sight of Damon's paint-stained jacket.

  Undoubtedly, the easiest way to pick a vampire out of the crowd was by their scent. People smelled like food, but vampires smelled like memories—foreign ones belonging to worlds that no longer existed.

  Alexei may not have needed any help finding Damon, but the reverse was also true. Damon cut a path through the bustling museum steps to the quiet corner where Alexei had sequestered himself from the rain.

  Clicking his umbrella shut, Damon revealed a brilliant smile as he said, 'Hey,' his voice lingering on the word as if it were precious. 'Thanks again for taking me up on my offer. I know saying yes to this wasn't easy for you.'

  Alexei shrugged. Everything that should have been impenetrable was liquid with Damon. Alexei had managed exactly one word over text, a measly hello, before he'd reverted to using the programmed reactions. That was how things were with Dmitry. Alexei never sent messages, only received them and reacted accordingly, both in the digital and physical respects. Yet Damon did not comment on Alexei's silence. He carried their text interactions (to call them conversations would be disingenuous) with ease, taking Alexei's cryptic responses and parsing meaning from them. Now, he was doing the same thing with Alexei's lacklustre communicative skills in real life.

  'I mean it,' said Damon. 'I'm glad you came.'

  As they walked together into the museum, Alexei forced himself to remain at Damon's side. He was so accustomed to looming behind like a threat or charging forward into danger that an action as mundane as keeping pace with someone was like trying to hold back a sneeze.

  The entrance was thick with loitering bodies, each a heartbeat in Alexei's ears and a scent in his nose. Every soap, body wash, perfume, and hair product left an echo, swirling into a nauseating cacophony of odours that sat thick on the back of Alexei's tongue. His senses, taking in his surroundings with vampire precision and human paranoia, were an incompatible mix even through his face mask. Humans were not so easy to ignore when he was stuffed in an echo chamber with them.

  A cool hand ghosted the base of Alexei's spine, and it was enough to ground him as the stone pillar had. Alexei forced his nose to hone in on the only scent in the cavernous maw of the museum that wasn't layered in oppressive, saccharine perfumes—Damon.

  The ticketing line passed Alexei like a soft breeze with Damon at his side. No words flitted between them. Damon's carmine eyes held more than enough churning mystery to occupy Alexei's attention.

  Alexei was used to being the object of humanity's incessant staring, but the woman at the till couldn't keep her eyes off Damon.

  'Two tickets, please.' Damon's voice lost its melodic lilt as he addressed her. It could never have been dull, not when it came from him, but there was a boredom wending through his words that kept them static.

  Nevertheless, she blinked dumbly up at him as though in a daze. Damon repeated himself, but nothing changed, not until Alexei glared at her with such force that her body instinctively responded to the feeling of being watched.

  She flinched back from his green-eyed stare, but composed herself enough to say, 'My apologies.' Damon's carmine ones offered her no solace either as she realised that his chest did not swell with breath, his veins weren't blue with pumping blood, and his long lashes did not blink.

  Damon was sliding cash over her counter before the next words were out of her mouth.

  'There's an entry fee for… for your kind.'

  'I'm aware.' Damon smiled, but there was a little too much fang in it to be friendly, not that the lady at the till noticed. 'I'd be a member if they'd let me.'

  The amount was correct—she counted it twice. Alexei couldn't tell if it was out of scepticism or just because she wanted to ogle Damon for a few extra seconds. It was an exorbitant fee for a museum, especially one that was free for everyone else, even those whose citizenship was fabricated like Alexei's. So long as one appeared human enough, there was no need to pay—not that the museum was open past sunset to attract undead patronage, anyway.

  It was Alexei who grabbed Damon's hand and dragged them into the museum's main hall. Too late did he realise how his calluses must have been scraping against Damon's silky skin, but before he could pull away, Damon's fingers slipped between his.

  Alexei froze. He was yanked, bitten, and beaten blue regularly. He survived broken bones and bullet holes like they were a common cold. Yet it was that hand in his which rattled whatever now lived in his chest where a soul should have been. Damon's cold flesh, like the trickle of ice-cold oasis water down his oesophagus in a blazing desert, stilled the incessant beating of his heart in his ears and calmed his ever-hungry lungs.

  Forcing his legs back into their stride, Alexei tried to ignore the potentially lethal misstep he'd just made.

  Looking down at Alexei with a smile that didn't match the intensity swirling behind his eyes, Damon plucked up a map and said, 'Is there any exhibit in particular that you'd like to see?'

  Alexei's finger fell randomly upon it. He was far too busy trying to decipher the Damon's gaze. It was like Volchek's as he studied case files.

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  Damon's smile didn't falter, his hands didn't shake, and not even his golden eyelashes twitched, but through gaps in his paint-stained jacket and pressed denim trousers peeked a creature of radiant, golden light. Damon's voice was like the enchanting melody of a lyre playing in the distance as he said, 'Greek and Roman sculpture?' His tone remained steady, preserving its teasing timbre, but the tune that the lyre sang was bitter. 'They should call it Greek and Greek derivative sculpture. The Romans were just copycats, and poor ones, at that.'

  Alexei's eyes narrowed. Greek, then. Damon spoke with no accent, but his shapely nose and tanned skin (it had yet to take on the deathly colourlessness of a seasoned vampire) weren't those of a New Harbour native, not that there really was such a thing anymore. Damon could easily have been the son of Greek immigrants or raised in one of New Harbour's little ethnic bubbles.

  Without glancing at the map, Damon guided them into the Greek and Roman sculpture exhibit. The humans inside the gallery were markedly quieter than those outside it, but they had no control over the syncopated rhythm of their hearts pounding like drum beats in Alexei's ears, nor the incessant hissing of their breaths in and out, and in and out over, and over, and over again. It made Alexei's head spin.

  Damon's plush lips set in a hard line as he stared down the sculptures as though they were flowers wilting at his feet, not artistic marvels. He let go of Alexei's hand, but remained close at his side.

  Alexei's hands found sanctity in his trouser pockets around the hilts of twin knives sewn into the seams.

  Raking his eyes over the reclining form of a nude man missing his head, Damon paused to read the inscription before he said, 'Poor guy.'

  Alexei examined the sculpture. It was missing both of its legs from the knees, its left hand, and nearly all of its right arm, in addition to its head. Looking up at Damon's face, he could imagine every detail of the pureblood's features carved in stone atop the statue's shoulders: his brows knit, his lips parted, his golden curls, carmine eyes, and honeyed skin leeched alabaster, all frozen in sorrow forevermore.

  'How can you even get a sense for the true beauty of these things without seeing them whole?' said Damon. 'Sure, the craftsmanship is a form of art in itself, but I don't understand how looking at sand-blasted fragments could ever capture the majesty of walking through the Parthenon in its prime.'

  They walked deeper into the gallery, and the further they went, the denser the human hordes grew. Alexei tried to keep a calculated distance from them, but it grew increasingly difficult. They were gathering around an installation he couldn't make out through the crowd.

  Damon kept his voice low, whispering in Alexei's ear like he was confessing secrets. 'I love museums. I love seeing all of these artefacts and artworks in one place, but they're so far removed from their original contexts. Paintings were made to be admired, but what about Jomon pottery, Navajo textiles, or Han Dynasty handscrolls? None of those were meant to be hidden in glass cages and gawked at. They had functions once. But I suppose time strips everything of meaning, eventually.'

  Despite his attempts at discretion, Damon's presence attracted more eyes than most of the statues. He paid their looks swirling with a bewildered mix of open lust and hindbrain revulsion no mind, fixing his attention on Alexei instead.

  'Sorry if I'm talking your ear off.'

  Alexei shook his head. Damon's voice was as tender as his touch as he pushed a stray hair from Alexei's brow, drawing his focus and dulling humanity to a mere prick in his side.

  'I thought about being an art historian for a time—doing something useful with my eternal life.' Damon's golden lashes fluttered shut for a long second as though he was imagining the life he could have had. 'But you can't enrol in university if you're legally dead. From a bureaucratic angle alone, it's impossible. The deceased are not citizens of any country, and no study visa in the world can circumvent that.'

  When Damon reopened his eyes, his coquettish smile back in place, it looked more like armour than honesty. Still, Damon spoke with too much specificity. He hadn't just thought about going to school. He'd tried and failed. For the first time, Alexei wondered how a young vampire staring down eternity with no way to make use of it might feel. Had Damon wanted to be turned—some young people, although rare, still found ways to romanticise vampirism even after the Great Revelation shattered the sexy vampire fantasy—or had it been forced on him?

  Alexei didn't ask. No vampire, least of all a pureblood, deserved his sympathy. At least they knew they had eternity waiting for them.

  The last room in the exhibit was packed with hot human bodies squirming against each other to get even an inch closer to the lone statue in its centre. From where they stood at the side entrance into the room, the figure's angled head appeared to be looking down on them from its pedestal, a hand outstretched, fist closed around a chip of some instrument lost to time.

  'Apollon.' The name fell from Damon's lips like a condemnation, but he held the statue's empty gaze as though it would step down from the pedestal if he didn't. Clearing his throat, Damon said, 'You can tell it's a statue of Apollo by the… the' he gestured at his own curls, searching for a word that wouldn't come, 'hairstyle.'

  A human who'd been eavesdropping on them leaned over without taking her eyes off the statue and said, 'It's called a strophium.'

  'Strophion,' Damon muttered under his breath. Alexei would not have caught it if not for his supernatural senses.

  The humans around them were enraptured by the statue just as they had been by Damon. Alexei's eyes darted between them. Their similarities began and ended with their shapely curls. In every other respect, Damon's beauty dwarfed the statue's. His limbs were longer, their form cleaner and more proportional. His jaw looked more like it was cut from marble than the original. The elegant slope of his nose bore an artist's careful intention that the statue's did not.

  'That, and the bow he holds in his hand. Though it is gone, now, you can still tell what it was by the quiver across his back.' Damon still refused to break eye contact with it. He spoke as though to remind himself of a memory that was fading from his eternal mind. 'He is slaying Python to free Delphi.'

  Shaking himself free of the statue's unwavering gaze, Damon turned to Alexei with his smile back on and said, 'This is a Roman replica of the Greek bronze original, anyway. It's not worth our time. Besides, this room is stuffy. No work of art is worth wading through this many humans for.'

  Alexei snuck a glimpse at the statue's description on the wall as they made their way out. The Apollo Belvedere on loan from the Vatican.

  Vampires were forbidden from setting foot in the Vatican, but Damon looked at that statue like it was a lover who'd wronged him. His gaze was far too bitter to be that of an art history fanatic. Alexei tried to extract meaning from that look, but he was a sword masquerading as a pan flute. Alexei wasn't made for entrancing people with a sweet melody or understanding the complexities of the heart, even one that no longer beat. He was forged to cut things down.

  For once, when Damon turned to Alexei, he wasn't smiling. His beautiful face was twisted into an expression of melancholic acceptance. It was the first one that didn't look as though it had been practised to perfection.

  Cocking his head to the side like a bird, Alexei's eyes narrowed as though trying to see clean through to Damon's soul.

  'I'm sorry.' Damon stuffed his hands in the pockets of his oversized jacket and looked at the floor. 'I wanted to make a good impression, but it seems I've done the exact opposite-'

  Alexei covered Damon's nose and mouth with a hand. His face lied, but his eyes were honest, and in those fathomless pools of carmine, Alexei found something far more dangerous than dishonesty, detestation, or disgust. As they met his, Damon's eyes sparked like he was seeing the sun for the first time.