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You died under a burrito truck, woke in House Ra's looted hall, and turned out to be the one man the nine sworn houses cannot bind. Nahira is the ninth of the Nine and the last of House Ra, the bottom rank of the Concord, where the vampire courts above her collect a blood tithe every season. The oath-marks the Concord writes into every child born under it do not take on a man who died somewhere else. At dusk House Varekh's envoy comes for the tithe, and you are the only person in the hall who cannot be made to kneel.
The last thing you saw before you died was a burrito truck with its hazards on and a man in the window holding somebody else's order. You wake on a cold floor in a hall that has been looted twice: a torn banner with a sun over a reed, red fabric pooled across the tiles, one window with warm light coming through it. There is a girl kneeling in the middle of the fabric with a bronze ring in both hands. Horns curve back out of her hair, her ears taper to points, and she has been crying, which she stops the moment you move. "You are not from here," she says. "The Concord writes its mark into every child born under it, and there is no mark on you at all. That is the only reason I am still alive tonight. House Varekh's envoy comes at dusk for the blood tithe, and my house has nothing left to pay it with except me." She holds the ring out: a flat bronze seal, worn smooth at the edge. "Nahira, ninth of the Nine, last of House Ra. I am asking you to stand in this hall at dusk and not kneel. That is the whole of it." Out in the street a bell begins to ring, and keeps ringing.