Nikolai’s at the worst bar in the Apollyon system when he gets the call.

He’s holding a glass of something dark, staring at the neon sign hung over the busted-up jukebox – don’t leave thirsty! in blood-red letters.

It’s dead quiet and nearly empty. A few long-haul freighters up at the bar, heads bowed low over half-empty tankards. The Hexmandian barkeep, busy at work. A couple in the back booth, fighting quiet in whispers and pincer-clicks.

Nikolai glances their way as one of them throws claw-hands up in disgust. They’re going to break up before they leave. I’d bet a thousand rubles on it. 

The payphone behind the bar rings. An unsteady soprano note. The barkeep answers with her left-third hand.

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Sure.”

She scans the bar’s meagre inhabitants until she sees Nikolai, bat-masked and cloaked.

“Hey, buddy, it’s for you.”

Nikolai sighs. Says, “Damn,” soft, sotto voice.

He leaves the glass at the table, was just holding it for something to do anyway.

He doesn’t drink…wine.

Theda doesn’t bother with a greeting. Neither does he. They both know the rules of the game they play. And Nikolai knows a pull on the leash when he feels it.

“Nicky,” she says, “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“Don’t call me that, Miss Valentino. And I don’t do favors. I repay debts.”

“Oh, Nicky, come on. You know what I mean. I’ve got a job for you. Pretty please?”

He checks his watch. “Where do I need to go?”

Nikolai Komarov walks half a block to the parking garage he’d left his ship in, shading his ill-adjusted eyes against the moon’s brightness, cursing Theda with every crooked curse he knows.

A turn of the key. A hyperspace jump to a bright and shiny galaxy. Nikolai bundles up against the suns, wraps up like a mummy in black velvet and white lace.

Helios is a cabaret planet, violet and vermilion and spotlights. He sticks out like roadkill in a bouquet on a planet like that.

Another parking garage. A paranoid turning up of collar and hood.

Theda is in her club like always, wearing rose-colored fur and an evening gown, long black cigarette holder loose between index and middle finger. The band plays synthetic jazz, and her glitter-strewn patrons smoke their cigarillos and sway.

She leans toward Nikolai, bats long rose-petal lashes.

“Wanna drink, Nicky?” she says. “Free of charge? I know what you like.”

Nikolai’s hungry as hell, but he doesn’t bite. “You wouldn’t know free if it stabbed you through the glass eye, Miss Valentino.”

Sometimes she laughs at the things he says. This time she doesn’t.

She just shrugs, looks at her long pearly-white nails.

“Fine, Nicky,” she says. “We’ll talk business.”

They go to her office, pink-mosaic floors turning to concrete, fog machine smog turning to drafts from open windows.

“Something’s killing my dancers, bleeding them dry and leaving them to rot.” Theda points at a spot on a quaint little local map. “This is where it’s been happening the most; this block here.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Well, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it, Nicky?”

Nikolai walks through the labyrinth of warehouses and neon signs and second-hand cigar smoke, pawn shop windows plastered with advertisements and secretive little signs, come on in! and open all-nite! in flashing purples and greens.

Theda had told him where to go, given him a map and course marked in dotted lines, but he’d thrown it in the trash outside her club.

Nikolai follows the scent of blood.

The cabaret he steps into is lime-lit and smoky, but underneath the nicotine and the gardenia perfume is something cadaverous. The death-stench miasma of Nikolai’s kind.

He leans against the back wall and watches.

The dancers twirl in tulle and turquoise lace, and the audience claps and cheers and heckles in roughshod tones. The pianist at the grand plays a jagged up-down waltz as the blood-trail scent Nikolai had followed leads to a puddle pooled at his wingtips, seeping through the floorboards and soaking up the fake Persian rug.

The song ends with a glissando, as graceful as a butcher knife. The dancers take neat little bows. 

The crowd cheers — throws cigarette butts and fake flowers and empty neoplastic shot glasses. A singer steps up, through the velvety violet curtains, and starts a slow song in an alto voice. The dancers sway like reeds, spin like tops, skirts a whirl of pastel and seaglass-green.

The pianist slinks through the back door. Nikolai follows.

The man to whom the trail leads, bloody and brackish, is taking a smoke break in the alley behind the cabaret, ill-lit in green gas-lamp light. He loosens his black tie and blows out a silvery cloud of smoke.

Turns as Nikolai’s boot makes a little click on an aluminum can crumpled on the concrete.

“You need something, pal?” he says, cocking his head like a bird.

His cheeks are rosy, his eyes bright. He looks well-fed.

“You’ve been drinking living blood,” Nikolai says. “Did you think no one would notice?”

The pianist smiles, fangs glinting chartreuse under the light. 

He points at Nikolai’s mask. “Don’t you wanna take that thing off? Aren’t you hungry? I know the dead stuff is nothing compared to what I’ve got.”

Desanguination always dulls the senses. It’s a hunger that knows just which buttons to press. 

Which claims to make.

Living blood can make you more lifelike, give you a humankind disguise, doe-eyed and cherubic, can almost make you feel alive again. You can almost feel your heart beating. It’s ready-made adrenaline.

But it’s a drug with a comedown like a brick to the brain.

And Nikolai is used to being the underdog.

“It’s done, Miss Valentino.”

Theda looks up from her accounts. “You got the heart?”

Nikolai drops something red and gory on her desk, like a dog bringing gifts. It splashes on the floor and the edges of her papers.

Theda pokes at it with her pen, wrinkling her nose. “Didn’t think your kind had blood of their own, Nicky.”

“We don’t. Now do me a favor and use my name, Miss Valentino.”

One of her ghouls scrubs at the floor, after Nikolai’s left.

He always leaves a little something to remember him by.

Nikolai is hurrying through crowded streets, clutching his stomach. He tries to focus on breathing, stopping in the uneasy shade of an alleyway. Doesn’t notice somebody’s close until they press a pistol to the back of his head.

“Buddy,” they say.”You’ve been sticking your nose places it don’t belong.”

They’ve got a modulator on — it gives a staticky buzz to every word.

Nikolai sighs. “Who sent you?”

A wasp nest scoff.

Nikolai curses himself to hell and back for not hearing their heartbeat. All he could hear was the ache.

He hears their heart now — a staccato-tempo tell. He turns quick, and they panic, bug-eye mask already frozen in horror. They pull the trigger. Hit him right between the eyes.

He claws them like a cat, and they drop the pistol, hand bleeding red through a black vinyl glove. 

A drop of it hits the concrete and Nikolai’s stomach lurches — hunger pangs biting through it sharp as fangs. He reels to the side, bracing against the alley’s wall. Gagging his throat raw.

Bug-mask tackles him hard then, pushes him out of the alley’s mouth and into the sun, and by sheer dumb luck in the jolt of teeth and claws and elbows, they manage to tear his hood. Bare the crown of his head to the tri-solar glare.

Nikolai Komarov burns to black ash on the sun-soaked asphalt like something small caught under a microscope.

He wakes up back on his ship, in the cryogenic coffin in the after-death dark. He spits out the embalming fluid, shakes off the grave dirt like a dog. His head hurts. He’s got a phantom bullet hole.

He boots up the computer, checks how long he was out.

“Six-and-a-half hours exactly, Mr. Komarov,” the computer says in its professional way.

Nikolai groans. A hoarse death-rattle. He can never regenerate fast when he’s blood-starved.

He starts up the plasma engine.

He’s on the lunarway on the way to visit an old friend when a distress call comes through, crackly and staticky and shaky as a dream come true.

It says, “Kolya? Is that you?” in gentle tones.

Its source is a cruiser half-burnt and wormed bad right through the hull, and it uses a voice 

Nikolai knows to be the kind of dead that sticks.

He mutes the radio, plugs his ears against the siren song. Speeds away like it might follow.

There are things out there with bigger teeth than him.

And he knows hunger when he sees it.

He stops at Euthenia. A casino-moon holdover from the Morozov empire, glowing all opalescent and green. It’s loud and smoky and crawling with gamblers, bright with a thousand open signs all whirring and flashing and beeping.

It gives Nikolai a headache, but his old friend Radomir always tells him to stop when he’s nearby.

He’s at his shop, hunched behind his filing-cabinet desk. Shining up a decanter Nikolai knows.

Radomir is porcelain-faced and shrouded, wolf-masked in black.

Euthenia is a nighttime planet, so there’s no need for these little cautions.

They keep them anyway. Goggles and gloves and winding-cloth cloaks are hard burdens to 

divest of, once you get used to their weight.

The shop is the one thing on Euthenia that Nikolai likes – the clicking clock-ticks of decrepit analogs, half crumbled to dust and half studiously polished with the strong-smelling potions Radomir imports from an apothecary on Minos. Cluttered close with old-planet antiques, choked with Terran crypt-dust.

“What are you loitering for?” Radomir says. “And stop your pacing.” Nikolai’s restlessness always makes him nervous.

“Who are you?” Nikolai says, “My father?”

“Bozhe moi. Just sit down.”

They sit in the morgue-dark of the shop on rowan-wood pews. Nikolai tells him about his last job. The life-stealer, walking unmasked in the day. The siren.

Radomir complains about the weather, and the moonlight, and the music his neighbors play, but they both know he won’t leave.

They go for dinner at the abattoir and Nikolai leaves, content.

He won’t have to eat again for months.

Nikolai sets his course and looks down at the gamblers and the tourists, hurrying to the shelter of the card-halls as the kaleidoscope rail starts to fall.

His ship hearse-black and vulture-winged in the midst of it.

The radio spits out static. A bell rings. Theda’s voice runs through his head, an uninvited earworm.

He hits the gas.