Parts of Paris were enough like parts of the city of Dis – the gloriously overdone architecture of the Opera, for example, the Palais Garnier and the Pandemonium Conservatory could have switched places with barely anybody noticing – that he had found the adjustment remarkably painless.

Vampire thrall can perhaps most usefully be considered as a kind of hybrid of hypnotism and sedation. Its effects vary depending on the individual vampire involved, as well as the victim’s susceptibility, but in general one can expect to experience analgesia, euphoria, diminishment or total loss of consciousness, and – afterward – total amnesia of

my wife, the author Arkady Martine,

Once he’d heard a miner describe what they called attacks of the weight: an occasional sudden and visceral awareness of the sheer mass of stone over their head, the heaviness of all that rock pressing down on them, the weight of it driving them into something like a panic attack. You got it a lot when you were new to the job, the miner had told

You never really got used to it, the change. You just stopped minding how much it hurt. St. Germain had heard it described as a full-body sneeze; for him it was what he imagined a brief but powerful convulsion might feel like, an instant of flaring pain as his bones changed shape and the tendons and ligaments and muscles re-formed themselves

Also, he was definitely a vampire. She couldn’t tell the color of his eyes from this distance, but she hadn’t needed to. The instant of eye contact had given her a familiar kind of mental tingle that Greta had long ago learned to recognize, a feeling like being momentarily and pleasantly drunk. It wasn’t exactly thrall, but it said very clearly

There had been that faint trace of vampire scent in the Place de la Sorbonne earlier. It could have been someone new; it could just as easily have been one of the Paris vamps he had encountered many times. They were pretty calm, to his knowledge: much too sensible, and too old, to be running around killing people in a profligate sort of way – let

“These spike readings,” said Crepusculus. “Are they ripples, from something coming through?” “I think so. Nothing really huge or powerful, just multiple minor incursions, but the effect on reality is cumulative – it could have set up a standing wave, that’ll shake things to pieces – no, I’m catastrophizing.” He pushed his hands through his

He was large. Varney put him at about six foot six, broad-shouldered, thickly muscled, moving with the easy grace of someone who keeps themselves in excellent physical condition. The hair pulled back into a loose queue at the back of his neck was wavy, thick, dark gold, streaked and grizzled with grey. To vampire – or vampyre – eyes, however, he