BLOODLINE ZERO
He has been down here for four hours, which is nothing, which is routine, which is what he tells himself.
The blood-sense has been smoking for eleven days.
Two hundred and sixty-three years he's had it. Since the night in 1762 when a woman named Elise, who turned him against his own considered wishes in a Viennese cellar during the Seven Years' War, pressed her wrist against his mouth and said, you'll understand in a moment, and he did. He understood immediately. He felt his bloodline snap into place the way you feel a map unfold — the specific geography of everyone who had ever come from Elise, and everyone who had come from them, a web of thirty-seven souls distributed across Europe like s