The Blood Count of Corrick

Corrick runs on blood the way other cities run on coal: measured, billed, and delivered weekly by the blue vans of the Ration Office. Every citizen has a page in the Registry, a ceiling, and a draw sheet, and every drop that crosses the counter gets logged by a night clerk with a pencil and a smell for trouble.

Ivo Marsh is that clerk. He was born with the Nose, the family gift that can read a bottle of blood like a letter: whose vein it left, how old it is, what it has been cut with, and whose mouth drank from the tap before it was ever bottled. His grandmother kept the office's field-book before him, and she taught him the first rule of the desk: Every unit has a name. Count softly.

Then one Tuesday the Nose catches a smell that is on no page at all: a draw of a hundred and forty units that no account in Corrick ordered, signed for by nobody, fed to something under the floor. The Registry, it turns out, is a shell. Its ghost accounts go back twenty years, to one wiped night the old-timers will not name. And the thing the city has been quietly feeding in the sealed sinks of the sub-basement is waking up hungry, because somebody upstairs has been skimming the rent.

The trail runs through the whole city's cellar: the annex where donors get farmed, the cull fridge where good blood is written off, the freight yard where the wolf pack chalks its doors, the river stair where the Ferryman's people trade in whatever the tide brings. And at the bottom of all of it, behind a hatch no key opens, waits the Founder, the first vampire of Corrick, the Old Tenant, forty units a week since the Famine Winter, and patient the way only a ledger is patient.

Ivo's gift has a price. Every deep read stokes a fever, and nine reads in one night sends a counter walking, out the door and down the stair and into the dark, and not all the way back. To audit a vampire's lease, out-stubborn a Registrar who signs like a machine, broker a peace between the wolves of Ballast Street and the Covenant that owns the dark, and keep his own mother's account from bleeding her white, he will need every scrap of his grandmother's field-book, a bitten boy with tram tickets in his sleeve, a dowager with a deck of cards and no king in it, and the one thing Corrick has never had under its Ration Office: an honest count.

And the wolves keep their own arithmetic: Tam, sixteen, bitten eight weeks and healing clean, is the first of a new class of donor, and his first registered draw will be the first entry in a ledger nobody has dared to open before.

Blood in, blood out. The city pays what the city draws. Nobody bleeds for free.