What Do You Do With a Predator Who Wants to Hunt?

Predators are supposed to hunt.

That becomes inconvenient when they live in Chicago.

For most of human history, a person could disappear without leaving much behind. No security cameras caught the last place they were seen. No phone recorded their movements. No credit-card transaction put them in a particular bar at a particular hour. No doorbell camera captured the stranger who walked away with them.

The modern world notices things.

For the Kalos, that creates a problem.

They have lived alongside humanity for thousands of years, and they have survived because they learned how to do it without being discovered. They own homes and businesses. They employ people. They participate in the communities around them. They can be charming, civilized, generous and exceptionally well behaved.

They are also predators.

Civilization didn't change that.

So what do you do when the behavior that comes naturally to you is also the behavior most likely to get you discovered?

For Vesper, the Problem Was Particularly Close to Home

Her father likes to hunt.

Lord Raphael Grey has lived for roughly four hundred years. He has watched cities rise, borders change and technology make the world progressively smaller. He understands perfectly well why discretion matters.

Understanding something and wanting to comply with it are not necessarily the same thing.

Vesper can't order her father not to hunt.

He's Lord Grey.

She also isn't particularly interested in changing him. Vesper's objection isn't that hunting is morally unacceptable. She's Kalos too.

Her objection is that it's dangerous.

A careless hunt doesn't merely create a problem for the individual Kalos involved. It creates witnesses. Questions. Patterns. Investigations. It attracts exactly the kind of human attention their species has spent centuries learning to avoid.

In an earlier century, the consequences might have been considerably more direct.

Vesper doesn't want people arriving at Grey Manor with pitchforks.

So she did what Vesper does.

She addressed the risk.

The Seventy Percent Solution

She couldn't eliminate Grey's desire to hunt. She couldn't forbid him from doing it. And she certainly couldn't guarantee that he would cooperate with whatever alternative she devised.

But she could make hunting somewhere else less appealing.

And if that worked often enough, the risk went down.

Vesper considered that a perfectly acceptable outcome.

Her solution works approximately seventy percent of the time.

That means thirty percent of the time, Grey still does exactly what Grey wants to do.

Vesper can live with thirty percent.

There is something important about that number, because La Ménagerie was never intended to make Grey safe.

Grey isn't safe.

It was intended to make him safer to have around.

And Grey isn't the only Kalos for whom Vesper has found that useful.

Over time, she has allowed certain other Kalos access as well. Not everyone. Not indiscriminately. La Ménagerie isn't a community recreation center for predators with poor impulse control.

Vesper chooses.

Because Different Kalos Hunt Differently

Vesper herself doesn't necessarily need to move through the world as Grey does. A woman can occupy a very different position in the ancient choreography between predator and prey.

She can be followed instead of following.

She can be approached.

She can let someone else believe the pursuit was his idea.

She can even appear to be the one being hunted.

None of which means she isn't hunting.

That kind of camouflage has always interested me about the Kalos. The successful ones don't survive by pretending their nature doesn't exist. They survive by understanding the world around them well enough to indulge that nature without exposing themselves.

Sometimes that requires restraint.

Sometimes it requires deception.

And sometimes it requires architecture.

She Built Him Somewhere to Go

Vesper's answer to Grey's problem wasn't a lecture, a rule or an appeal to his better nature.

She built him somewhere to go.

A place where the environment could be controlled. Where appetites that might attract attention elsewhere could be accommodated with considerably less risk. Where Grey could remain Grey without Vesper having to wonder quite so often what problem might arrive at her door the following morning.

It wasn't perfect.

It didn't need to be.

Seventy percent was enough.

And perhaps that tells you more about Vesper Grey than a perfect solution ever could.

She doesn't confuse control with certainty. She doesn't expect predators to stop being predators. And she doesn't waste much time wishing the world were different from what it is.

She manages the world she has.

Her father wanted to hunt.

Vesper wanted Grey Manor left standing.

So she designed a compromise.

She called it La Ménagerie.

Exactly what happens inside?

I'm not telling you... yet.

But the doors to Grey House are already open.

Read the prologue free.

—Antonia Portage