Chapter Text
Thousands of years ago, Rio would have ruled over a castle. A proper estate on a mountain—or at least a dramatic hill. It would be a sharp, daunting expanse of land with a cliff. Always with a cliff. The kind of place you could toss a body off of, and it would look like they’d fallen from Heaven.
There would have been hundreds of rooms and just as many servants—golden chandeliers, stained glass windows, shrines and statues with her likeness carved out of marble.
None of this was actually a hypothetical, really—Rio knew she had ruled over one of these, once—but when your age starts to number in the thousands, memories become more like fiction than fact. You’re constantly having to parse through what is real and what is imagined—
It was all a little hard to believe, really, given her current situation in New York City.
“Five thousand dollars a month for 215 square feet?” Agatha laughed shrilly as soon as they were (barely) out of earshot from the rental agent. “Rio, I’m going to kill myself.”
“Can you remind me why we don’t just kill the landlord instead?”
Rio joined Agatha where she was currently sitting on the cement, an umbrella propped over head to shield from the sun.
In response to her very genuine question, Agatha glared at her, then gestured toward a camera that was perched on a nearby streetlight.
“The modern surveillance state, Rio,” she groaned. “We’ve been over this. Remember when I was on the CIA watchlist in the early 2000s? We couldn’t go on vacation for a decade.”
Rio frowned. “That was unpleasant.”
“Yes, it was.”
Cars whizzed by in front of them. Big yellow taxis. Trucks and tiny Kia Souls. Rio thought back to when she and Agatha traveled by horse and buggy. The streets had smelled better then, somehow, even covered in horse shit.
A rat raced by Rio’s eyes now, voyaging from one sewer grate to the next. She thought her and Agatha weren’t much different than that rodent.
They’d known each other for six hundred years, roughly. Right around the invention of the printing press. Vampires had lived well back then. Less—as Agatha put it— surveillance.
Murder was a lot easier to get away with. Riches were more material; less digital, no credit cards. If you lived forever, it was quite easy to accumulate a lot of gold, quite like a dragon.
But a little incident involving a King of England had wiped out that particular source of wealth, and then there was the Bubonic Plague, and her and Agatha had lived with a little less for much too long.
Still, she was lucky to have a friend like her.
Friend felt like too small a word to describe it, really. Partner wasn’t quite encompassing; associate was underselling it. They met over bodies; Rio had killed Agatha’s mother, infamous leader of the most notorious vampire clan in history. She’d expected Agatha, Evanora’s firstborn daughter, to naturally retaliate, but instead she’d snuck out of the dark, clapped Rio on the back as they stood over her mother’s corpse, and said:
“I think we’re going to be great friends.”
In the years since, they invested most of their time in murder. Murder for power, murder for money, murder for fun. Agatha was unquenchable, and Rio just liked to watch her work.
But as technology had advanced, their favorite hobby had gotten trickier—a stint in federal prison for Rio had turned them both off of it since the 2010s. They’d been living off their savings ever since, but even medieval gold bars weren’t safe from inflation.
“Alright,” Rio sighed. It looked like there was no other option. “I give up. We can—”
Agatha brightened, grinning wide, and interrupted her.
“Enthrall a billionaire and take all his money?”
“Yes.” Rio rolled her eyes, but couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t look so excited.”
***
It wasn’t that Rio was against creating thralls on principle. It was more… the consequences.
Creating a thrall meant there was a small chance that whoever you put under your control could eventually fight off that control, and become a vampire in their own right. And when thralls regained sentience as vampires, they tended to have only one thought on their mind—revenge.
The last time her and Agatha had created a thrall, it had been the King of England. Which, as aforementioned, had gone insanely poorly. Agatha-almost-died poorly. Rio was picking the stakes out of her for days. It was the worst day of her life. She hadn’t been interested in repeating it.
But desperate times, desperate measures.
They had to fund Agatha’s coffee habit somehow.
***
Agatha was curled up on their AirBnb couch, the NYC skyline painting a pretty picture of flickering lights into the night. She had a copy of the Forbes 30 under 30 pulled up on her phone, which Rio observed over her shoulder—and promptly laughed.
“I finally lifted the thrall ban, and you're settling for mid-twenties tech scammers?”
“Of course not,” Agatha scoffed. She slid her hand up Rio’s neck from behind, tugging at her hair and pulling her down to the couch—all without glancing up from her phone. Rio landed ungracefully by her side, the back of her scalp stinging where Agatha pulled.
“Ow . You could have just asked me to sit down.”
“And you could be quiet for once. Neither is going to happen.”
Her words were cold, but Rio could see Agatha fighting a grin. That was Agatha, always fighting something down—stifling it into submission. And then came Rio’s job, wrenching it out of her. It being just about anything—an emotion, an idea, a corpse Agatha had just sucked dry.
This time, it was her phone.
“Hey!” Agatha scowled. “Give that back.”
“Tell me your plan first,” Rio said, holding the red iPhone to her chest. “I’m impatient.”
Agatha took this as a challenge—as she took everything—and pushed Rio down onto the couch, climbing over her body like a rabid animal, hands tugging at the device.
Her eyes shone bright, blood red. Her fangs dropped from her canines.
And oh, how Rio loved to see her like this.
“Give. Me,” she breathed hot, venomous. “ That .”
She dug her fingers into Rio’s hands. Rio felt blood prickle around her wrists.
Rio chuckled. “I’m good.”
Agatha groaned and leaned down, her lips brushing against Rio’s shoulder. Rio’s eyes went wide at the contact, her pupils dilating in seconds. They tussled like primates every so often, just to get it out of their system—rolling around on the carpet, nails digging through skin—but Agatha had never done anything as disarming as plant a kiss to her shoulder mid-game, no, that would be awfully strange; foul play, really, outside the rulebook—
Agatha’s fangs sunk into her shoulder. Rio squealed.
“What the hell, Agatha!”
She pushed the other vampire off her, and Agatha’s back thudded on the opposite arm of the couch. Blood was dribbling down her chin, and she was smiling like a wild beast. So, so pleased with herself. Rio’s heart rabbeted in her chest uncontrollably; faster than it had in years; so fast that she failed to notice that Agatha was holding her phone again, wiggling it in the air proudly.
Rio clamped her hand down on her shoulder, where blood was seeping, and gaped.
“You’re insane.”
Agatha’s grin only grew brighter. Wordlessly, she raised herself from the couch, and disappeared to the kitchen. When she returned a minute later, she was carrying a wet wipe, a roll of paper towels, and the remote control for the television. She slowly came up from behind Rio and began to clean the wound, then pat it dry.
“Sorry,” she said, but her light tone betrayed her. “I think I got a little hungry.”
Rio laughed shortly, because she wasn’t sure what else to do.
In six hundred years, Agatha had never bitten her. Not even when they had been starving in the streets of London. Not even out of excitement after they’d killed the entire mafia in Rome. Not even when Rio had gotten enthralled by another vampire, and tried to tear Agatha limb from limb. Even then, Agatha had refused to use her teeth to subdue her.
Fangs were for killing. Well, killing, and, that one other thing—
Rio reddened.
No, she definitely didn’t mean it like that.
Agatha slunk back onto the couch, remote in hand. She looked at Rio with her lip bitten, a genuinely contemplative look on her face. It was a sort of speechlessness that looked very strange on Agatha. It made Rio want to say something, anything, even though she wasn’t sure what, but before she could, the expression was gone. Replaced by an easy overconfidence.
Agatha had raised the phone screen in front of her.
There was a picture of a man on there, from the 30 under 30 list. Tommy Ashcroft . Rio’s eyes scanned his profile. Tech startup founder, based in NYC, yada yada. Nothing special. Why would Agatha care about this guy? They could fry such bigger fish. Fuck. Rio didn’t even care. Her head was swimming. Why did Agatha bite her?
“I thought you said—” she began.
Agatha interrupted her. “Keep reading.”
With a reluctant sigh, she did. And that’s when her eyes landed on the last line.
Tommy Ashcroft is the son of Richard Ashcroft, billionaire CEO of Ashcroft Oil.
Richard Ashcroft. The second richest man on planet Earth.
“Oh, Christ, Agatha.”