The Sinner Hunting System

"...Tch."

Whatever sudden rage had surged up dissolved into helplessness across the distance of centuries.

Raphael exhaled and looked more carefully.

The cages were small,designed for pigs, barely a meter and a half, and every one of them held people.

Different ages, different faces, different expressions.

Some were boys and girls with wide frightened eyes, bodies unmarked, not yet beaten, newly purchased or freshly delivered, staring at an unknown future with undisguised terror.

Some were young men and women who were actively scanning their surroundings, hands wrapped around the bars, studying angles and distances, still looking for a way out, the set of their jaw still holding some thread of resolve.

Most showed bruising. Taken by force.

Some were middle-aged couples, two people crammed into a cage built for one, pressed against each other, breathing with difficulty, wounds long since scabbed over.

They had been here for some time.

And some were old. Curled in the corners of their cages, faces drained of color, eyes flat with a specific kind of exhaustion that came from witnessing too much and waiting for it to be over.

Calm the way livestock were calm, accepting the end that had already been decided for them.

Every cage had a small placard hanging from the outside, written in the tone of a menu, blood type, age, health rating, sugar content.

Raphael breathed in slowly and pulled his gaze away. He hadn’t noticed his hand closing into a fist.

He knew the term. It existed in folklore, in mythology, in IFSA’s classified archives.

Human ranch.

Not a specific place, a practice. The keeping and feeding and gradual cultivation of humans for eventual consumption.

In the dark centuries before the human federations had established their dominance, humans without innate supernatural ability were simply the most convenient prey.

The practice had existed among vampires, among dragons, among sirens and various other large non-human populations.

He had known the term before tonight. Now he knew what it looked like.

Hundreds of people. Hundreds of souls. Hundreds of lives, hung in iron cages above dining tables, waiting to be chosen by whatever vampire happened to be hungry.

As, for instance, now.

The lantern’s light revealed a window, beyond it, the dark beginning its slow retreat before an approaching sunrise. Inside, candles everywhere, the room blazing.

Count Jestan walked with unhurried elegance, leading a woman dressed in the layered finery of high-society vampiric fashion.

He shook one of the cages. The young man inside jolted awake from a doze and scrambled backward immediately, but the cage was too small, there was nowhere to go, and the two faces peering in only came closer.

"My lady, this is exactly the type you mentioned preferring.

Young man, good muscle, low body fat, low blood sugar. And, perhaps most importantly, no history of transmissible disease. Still intact."

The lady pressed her face toward the bars and looked the young man over with careful attention.

"Very good. Very good indeed. I’ll take him. What’s the price?"

Count Jestan glanced at her, she was clearly the wife of someone significant, and his manner shifted accordingly, the arrogance he used with human merchants nowhere in evidence.

"Selling to another vampire, I’d normally ask eighty gold. The bounty hunters who bring these in need paying this Friday, and there’s the cost of managing the various relationships involved, all of that."

He let the high figure sit for a moment, then changed his tone entirely.

"But who are we talking about here? The Marquess’s new wife. A young vampire, recently turned.

When you come to my establishment to drink, my lady, that is an honor to me."

He smiled.

"Tonight is my treat. Please drink as much as you like, and don’t give it another thought. I only hope you’ll do me the pleasure of joining me for afternoon tea three days from now."

The lady covered her smile with one hand and touched his shoulder lightly.

"You flatter me, I’m only a concubine, I wouldn’t dare put myself beside the Marquess’s primary wife.

But you’re very thoughtful, I won’t refuse. Though you do know what you’re doing, don’t you? Flattering a vampire marquess’s woman..."

She laughed, quiet and amused. "Bold. But I like it."

The count smiled, picked up a small knife from the nearby table, reached into the cage, and pulled the young man to the bars by his hair, pinning his head against the iron.

The young man’s hands grabbed at the bars. His throat worked.

The knife opened the artery in a single clean motion.

Blood came out in a steady stream into the wooden bowl the count held ready in his other hand, filling it slowly to the brim before he released his grip.

The young man slumped. Bubbles of blood rose and burst at his lips. His body shook once, and then it stopped.

The lady took the bowl and tilted it back, her throat moving steadily until it was empty. She lowered it and touched the corner of her mouth with two fingers.

"Remarkable. So that is what human blood tastes like. Hm. I had no idea, before."

The projection ended. Like a recording reaching the end of its reel, it simply stopped, the space returning to empty ruin. He swept the lantern across it again. Nothing came back.

He turned the light toward the broad base at the center of the room.

A ballroom materialized in the beam, candles and oil lamps clustered everywhere, and still the light barely reached the far walls. Outside the windows, deep night.

Vampires moved across the floor in pairs and groups, turning in slow patterns, while a human orchestra played at the side with the careful mechanical precision of people who understood the cost of a wrong note.

Their faces held nothing. They played and did not listen and kept their eyes low.

Then a rhythm stumbled. A handful of beats lost their shape.

A young girl in the orchestra, barely old enough to be there, looked up with the expression of someone who has just made a fatal mistake.

She tried to make herself smaller. The count reached through the musicians and took hold of her.

"Worthless insect. You can’t even manage this much. What use are you to me."

His face twisted. The claws extended. He was going to open her then and there.

An elderly vampire crossed the floor toward them. Even the count’s arm slowed.

"Wait. This one has good bones. Let me have a look."

He laughed as he said it, a soft repetitive sound, and came to stand beside the girl without asking anyone’s permission.

His hands moved over her skull, tracing the contours of the bone through her hair, his clouded eyes registering quiet satisfaction.

"Very nice. Excellent skull shape."

He laughed again.

"It would make a beautiful cup. Fill it with her own blood and drink from it, that would taste particularly fine, I think."

The girl’s breath came in short pulls. Her legs gave out beneath her and she went to her knees on the floor.

"No! please! please!!!"

The old vampire didn’t look at her. He looked at the count.

"I may be getting forgetful in my old age, what’s today’s date? I prefer to drink on even-numbered days. Better for the constitution."

The count took a sip from the glass in his hand.

"The seventeenth, my lord. Tuesday."

The old vampire, the Marquess himself, the same one whose young wife had drunk from the bowl, laughed softly, grabbed the girl by the hair, and began walking her toward the far end of the room.

"Ah, getting old. My hands aren’t as sharp as they used to be. The killing takes longer now. I do hope you hold up through it, haha."

The projection cut off in the middle of her crying.

Raphael stood in the quiet that followed and said nothing.

His time in the Black Gloves had required him to walk through crime scenes and reconstruct what had happened in them, and he had done it enough times that the sight of violence no longer moved through him the way it once had.

He shook his head, without much feeling in it, and turned away.

He walked the third floor. No new projections, but on the walls, wherever he pointed the lantern at one of the round recesses, a circular painting appeared.

Each one had a clock face showing a different time, with only an hour hand, no minute hand.

The style across all of them was abstract, each painting depicting something different: a wine glass, a musical note, a small cake, a bed, a coin, a skull, a silver blade.

Three paintings on each side of the room, one at the far end.

Two of them are particularly unique: one clock has two hour hands, and the other has no hour hands at all.

Seven paintings. Seven times. Seven days in a week.

"Seven paintings. Seven times. Seven days..."

Raphael felt the answer beginning to take shape. The clue wasn’t in the tragedies themselves, it had never been.

What mattered was the light outside the windows. The dates and days the characters had mentioned in passing.

Seven hour hands. Seven meal times.

The date and time were the code.