Drex Valen didn't need to look surprised.
That was the first lesson of the day.
The second was that vampires, for all their elegance and ancient self-importance, were still creatures of habit. Once a system had been in place long enough, they could turn mass exploitation into sothing that looked almost respectable from a distance.
That was what the so-called blood economy had beco.
The doctor's report on the victims was blunt.
They couldn't speak.
Couldn't think.
Couldn't even really live.
Just breathing, technically. Living bodies hollowed out into compliant husks.
The facility had already been sealed off. The sll of antiseptic, blood, and scorched tal hung in the air.
Drex's phone had been ringing nonstop for the past hour.
He set it down on the table and let it buzz itself into silence.
"Looks like a lot of people don't want doing sothing stupid," he said.
Black Widow stood nearby, arms folded, watching him with the kind of expression that ant she already knew exactly how bad things could get if he chose to escalate.
The U.S. governnt had sent a response almost imdiately after the blood farm was exposed.
The vampire elder from the North and South Arican council had stepped in person into the negotiations. An ancient pureblood, over a thousand years old, polished and aristocratic and clearly used to getting his way.
He had agreed to pay compensation to the victims.
He had agreed to pay compensation to the U.S. governnt.
He had even agreed to pay compensation to Drex's bureau.
People that old didn't stay powerful by accident. They accumulated influence the sa way they accumulated gold, assets, and favors. By the ti they were done, their wealth was more terrifying than most nations' budgets.
The council also delivered the owner of the underground blood factory, plus a handful of his n, to S.W.O.R.D. for trial.
Drex looked over the prisoners as they were unloaded from shipping containers.
Most of them were mixed-blood vampires.
The ten purebloods among them were plainly from a different class entirely. Not just in blood, but in bearing. Old money. Old monsters.
"They're very good at this," he muttered.
Nick Fury, standing off to the side, imdiately tensed.
He knew exactly what Drex ant.
"Don't go wild, Director," Fury said carefully. "There are too many things tied up in this. If you hit the wrong people, the fallout will be ugly."
Drex gave him a sidelong glance.
"I know, Fury. I'm not planning to burn the whole nest down."
That earned him a look of mild relief.
"I just want to wipe out a few mixed-blood dens," Drex added. "Let them feel the floor shake a little."
Fury said nothing.
That, at least, sounded reasonable enough.
Drex tapped two fingers against the table, already thinking through the optics. A asured response. Enough violence to make a point. Enough restraint to keep the governnt from panicking. A man like him was expected to act like a disaster with a business plan.
He could do that.
He would do that.
And after the vampires had had their little public humiliation, he'd let a monster finish the job.
S.W.O.R.D. moved first.
At Drex's command, agents swept through more than a dozen vampire gathering places across the city.
There was no subtlety in it.
No rcy either.
Thousands of mixed-blood vampires were killed in the raids.
The pureblood leadership saw the writing on the wall almost imdiately. They didn't protest. They didn't escalate. Instead, they quietly started pulling their people out of New York, then the country, then anywhere else they thought might beco too expensive to hold.
They had no idea how far Drex would go.
Neither did anyone else.
The mixed-bloods, however, noticed sothing else.
The purebloods didn't actually care whether they survived.
They cared about wealth. Influence. Security. Status.
The rest was disposable.
That realization spread fast.
Fast enough to beco anger.
Fast enough to beco rebellion.
"Vampires are moving into New York in force?" Drex said, reading the intelligence packet with interest. "That's useful."
Black Widow stood beside him, scanning the reports.
"The council is treating this like a show of strength," she said. "You've started squeezing them, and they're worried the pressure will keep rising. Humans got bolder after the monster crisis. Now the vampires think their territory is shrinking."
S.W.O.R.D.'s information network had beco terrifyingly efficient. Any shift in vampire movent, any unusual cluster of finance transfers, any political pressure from their upper ranks, it all showed up quickly now.
"They want the regulators and enforcent agencies to stop hunting lower-level vampires as aggressively," Natasha continued. "Basically, they're trying to intimidate the human elite and force a new balance."
Drex smirked faintly. "aning the blood farms and trafficking routes are still part of the plan."
"They call it harvesting," Black Widow said.
She didn't sound impressed.
She'd seen enough of vampire behavior back when she worked in S.H.I.E.L.D. to know that their manners were decoration. Underneath the polished surface, they were predators with accounting skills.
"And now that we shut down the blood factory," she went on, "their cheap supply is gone. They have to buy plasma from the governnt. The price went up from five hundred dollars per hundred milliliters to five hundred and fifty. That's already forcing a lot of lower-tier vampires into hunger territory."
"Hungry vampires are a problem," Drex said.
"They need about a hundred milliliters a day just to function," Natasha replied. "Without it, they get weak, sluggish. Eventually they drop into dormancy."
Drex leaned back. "So?"
"So they may start feeding on civilians."
He looked at her.
"Didn't we already cull thousands of the lower mixed-bloods?"
"We did," she said. "But New York alone still has over a hundred thousand mixed-blood vampires. And more are gathering here."
Back when S.H.I.E.L.D. still existed, the organization had quietly funded vampire hunters and kept the population within a controllable range.
Then S.H.I.E.L.D. had collapsed.
S.W.O.R.D. had risen.
And the vampires had started growing again.
Maybe faster than before.
"The purebloods don't care about controlling mixed-blood growth," Drex said. "If anything, they probably like having a larger underclass. More labor. More leverage. More bodies to spend."
There was no historical template for this situation that helped much.
Vampires were too old, too embedded, too intertwined with human institutions.
Not a clean problem.
Never a clean problem.
In a port city sowhere in Eastern Europe, Ruslan jolted awake from a nightmare, grabbed the edge of his bed, and cursed in a hoarse voice.
He rubbed his short brown hair, then reached instinctively for vodka before rembering.
Not today.
He had a blood-slave appointnt.
That ant no alcohol. No smoking. No shortcuts.
If he failed the health check, he wouldn't get paid.
Ruslan grimaced and shoved the bottle back into the cabinet.
The arrangent had beco normal to him over the years, as normal as breathing, and probably older than most modern professions.
Blood feeding had a history stretching back more than five hundred years.
The old Europeans had believed blood held the soul.
If you wanted to stay young forever, the simplest theory was to replace your aging blood with the blood of soone younger.
A crude idea.
A disgusting one.
And, apparently, a very profitable one.
...
Read up to 100 chapters ahead and access exclusive novels by joining my Patreon!
patreon/Zyxxar
User Comments
0 comments from readers