"They can't get away with this."
The S.W.O.R.D. agents stared at the video broadcast in stunned silence, their anger slowly curdling into sothing closer to disbelief.
Drex Valen shut his phone off and set it aside.
"The vampires are not going to be wiped out," he said flatly. "And nobody's going to define them as monsters either. Monsters are pests. Vampires are pests too, but to the politicians and financiers backing them, they're profitable pests."
The ssage from the Arican governnt had been obvious enough.
A thousand-year-old pureblood elder from the Vampire Council of the Aricas had already negotiated directly with Washington. He had agreed to compensate the victims, and he had also agreed to compensate the U.S. governnt and Drex's S.W.O.R.D. Bureau.
Centuries of survival had left vampires with wealth that eclipsed most human dynasties.
The elder also arranged for the owner of the underground blood facility, along with his subordinates, to be handed over for judgnt.
"They know exactly how to play this ga," Drex muttered.
Across the room, Nick Fury watched the captured vampires being delivered in sealed shipping containers. Most of them were mixed-bloods. The ten purebloods among them, however, were clearly aristocrats by vampire standards.
"Don't do anything reckless, Director," Fury warned.
He was worried Drex might be young enough to insist on pushing the issue.
Vampires were tied to too many of Arica's hidden financial channels. Nobody in power wanted that system torn apart.
Drex glanced at him and shrugged.
"I know, Fury. But I should be allowed to take a swing at a few mixed-blood nests to let off so steam."
Fury said nothing.
That, at least, felt reasonable.
Drex tapped his fingers against the table with a faint, knowing smile. He needed to make a show of force. If he didn't, his entire image as a ruthless, brilliant man who solved problems however he pleased would start to crack.
So he would give the vampires a ssage.
And then, after that, he would let a monster do the rest.
At his command, S.W.O.R.D. operatives raided more than a dozen vampire hideouts without rcy. Thousands of mixed-blood vampires were wiped out in the process.
The vampires knew exactly what S.W.O.R.D. had done.
They didn't protest.
They didn't retaliate.
Instead, the pureblood leadership quietly told their own people to leave New York. If possible, leave the United States entirely.
Nobody knew how far Drex Valen would take this.
Nobody wanted to find out.
The mixed-blood vampires noticed sothing else too.
The purebloods did not care whether they lived or died.
The only things that mattered were bloodlines, wealth, and status.
That realization lit a fuse.
A lot of mixed-blood vampires began talking about resistance.
"Vampires are gathering in New York?" Drex said, reading over the intelligence reports with interest. "That's useful."
The Blood Clan was fractured.
Not exactly a unified nation, then. More like a state slipping toward civil instability.
"The younger vampires are being pulled in from everywhere," Black Widow reported. "Money is flowing into the city, along with political pressure from the upper tiers of their hierarchy. The elders think the monster crisis has made humans bolder, and that vampire territory is shrinking."
S.W.O.R.D.'s intelligence network had beco absurdly efficient.
Vampire movent patterns were identified almost as soon as they shifted.
"They're worried that enforcent agencies, including us and the Arican vampire regulators, are getting less afraid of killing off disobedient lower-class vampires," Black Widow continued. "They want to reassert control. Rebalance the situation. Basically, they want to intimidate the human elite and carve out enough room to survive."
"Let guess," Drex said dryly. "That includes blood farms and human trafficking."
Black Widow gave him a calm look.
"They call it harvesting."
She had dealt with vampires back when she worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. She knew exactly how they operated.
"And because we shut down that massive blood factory, the cheap plasma they were feeding to low-tier vampires disappeared," she said. "Now they have to buy plasma directly from the governnt. Last I checked, the U.S. raised the price from five hundred dollars per hundred milliliters to five hundred and fifty. Most of the lower vampires can't afford that. They need at least one hundred milliliters of blood a day just to function. Without it, they beco lethargic. Eventually they sleep."
"So what you're saying is..." Drex leaned back in his chair.
"They're hungry," Black Widow said.
"And?"
"They may start attacking civilians."
Drex raised an eyebrow.
"Haven't we already wiped out thousands of the low-level mixed-bloods?"
"Thousands is nothing," she said. "Just in New York alone, there are more than a hundred thousand mixed-blood vampires. And more are still moving in."
Back when S.H.I.E.L.D. still existed, the organization had funded vampire hunters and worked to keep their numbers within a manageable range.
But after S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed and S.W.O.R.D. was born into the vacuum, the vampires had surged again.
Probably more than before.
"The purebloods don't care about controlling the mixed-blood population," Drex said. "If anything, they probably prefer it this way. More bodies. More leverage. More money. More power."
There was no historical precedent for this situation that could help him.
Vampires were simply too entrenched.
In a port city sowhere in Eastern Europe, a brown-haired man nad Ruslan jolted awake from a nightmare.
He rubbed at his ssy short hair and cursed under his breath before reaching for vodka.
Old habit.
Automatic.
He opened the cabinet and pulled out a bottle that still had about a third left in it.
Then he froze.
Today was the day.
The day he reported for blood slave work.
aning no drinking.
No smoking.
Not if he wanted the test to pass.
If he failed, there would be no money.
Ruslan grimaced and swore again.
He had no other inco. No useful skills either. The idea of giving up alcohol made him angry, but money was still money.
And this particular line of work had a history stretching back more than five hundred years.
It was basically the sa tradition as ancient bloodletting dicine.
Old Europeans had long believed that the soul lived in the blood.
So if you wanted immortality, one of the simplest ideas in the world was to replace your aging blood with young blood.
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