Poppa Divine had gone three hundred years without a name for his hunger. Not a woman's blood, not a soldier's, not a child's. His line thirsted for a blood no living body carried, and an elder had cursed them into that starving. Tonight he stood outside a stone mansion in Dark Hollow, hunting the one thing that could free him: the elder's true name. Only the oldest keepers of this valley remembered the cursed lines. And the oldest keepers hid from creatures like him. The mansion was seventh-century work, timber and stout stone, ivy crawling the frame. Poppa had knocked at doors like this for a hundred nights. Every keeper slammed the door or drew a blade. They smelled what he was. They did not care what he wanted. This time he did not knock. He crouched in the garden bed beneath a window. There grew a wolfbane plant with blossoms that glowed vivid crimson in the dark. Keepers planted it to burn his kind on contact. But Poppa remembered a older truth. Wolfbane grown this red only bloomed where a keeper still spoke the old rites. Someone inside kept the customs. Someone inside remembered. He broke a single glowing stem. The sap seared his palm white, then black. He gritted his teeth and pressed his burned hand to the great wooden door. The door opened before he could knock. An old woman stood there, small and bent, a lantern shaking in her grip. She saw his ruined hand. She saw the wolfbane crushed in it. "A vampire who bleeds himself on my flowers," she said. "You want something no thief would want." "A name," Poppa said. "The elder who cursed my line. I bring you my own pain as proof I mean no harm." She studied the burn. Her hand steadied. "I am the last who kept these rites. The others died, or forgot, or fed you lies to send you off." She stepped back and let the lantern light fall on the hall behind her. "Come. But not for the reason you think." Inside, she set a ledger on a table thick with dust. She opened it to a page marked in faded ink. Poppa leaned close and read the words. His breath stopped. The elder who cursed his line had a name. But beside that name, the keeper had written a second word: a warning. The elder still lived. And the elder had cursed others before Poppa's blood, others who had come to this same house, this same page, this same woman. "Two came before you," she said. She named them low. "One went mad and calls himself a prophet. The other rots in old velvet and old pride. You are not the first to seek this name. You are only the first to survive the plants." Poppa closed the ledger. He had his name at last. He also had two others who wanted the elder dead first.