Welcome home, she thought, and the irony was so bitter she could taste it.
She walked through the front door.
The entrance hall was exactly as she remembered — black marble floors, silver sconces, portraits of dead Aurelions staring down from the walls with their characteristic expression of aristocratic constipation. The air smelled of beeswax and old blood and the particular, cloying perfume that Thalyra wore to mask the smell of the corpse flowers she grew in the conservatory, which was either a hobby or a threat, depending on whom you asked.
Thalyra was not in the entrance hall. A small mercy. Instead, there was a maid — young, human, trembling slightly in the way that human servants in vampire households always trembled, like rabbits who had taken employment in a fox's den and were beginning to question the career choice.
