“Well, yeah, but when you live with it, you learn to tune things out,” Rayth explained in response to Lune’s question about his sense of smell. “If I paid attention to every scent around me all the time, it would drive me crazy.”
	The only smells he really focused on were silver and blood, the former because it was sometimes associated with hunters and the latter because, well, he was a vampire. But he decided not to bring her attention back to that.
	When she called him Count von Count, he shook his head, though he couldn’t stifle the smile on his lips. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who could throw kids’ show characters around in the form of an epithet. He was going to have to wrack his brain for better references later on, so he could show her that he wasn’t going to let her win “most creative” that easily.
	Walking with her to the gate that would take them to the train, he was relieved that she seemed invested enough in chatting with him that her gaze didn’t stray to the mess left behind by the troupe.
	Briefly, he peered over her shoulder to see that Frieda was rounding everyone up. The ringmistress didn’t always gather them after a show, but he remembered that she’d done the same thing the day he’d joined the circus. The only difference this time was that their newest member wasn’t present to be formally introduced.
	[i]She must be warning everyone that Lune’s a human,[/i] he deduced, his scarlet eyes flicking back to the girl’s face. They’d never taken a human in before, and since some of the monsters in the group were even more bloodthirsty than he was—so to speak—the faerie would have to lay down some ground rules so she wouldn’t be killed. He wondered if Frieda was telling them all that Lune didn’t know they weren’t human too.
	At her question, he snapped out of his musing to pay attention, not wanting to clue her in to his wandering thoughts and get curious when the scene behind her looked like a horror flick.
	“Las Vegas?” he brightened at the name. “I’ve always liked that place. The streets are lively, but I’ve never been able to get into the casinos. Can’t pass for twenty-one.” He held up his hands in a helpless shrug. It was one of the downsides to being immortal. He’d passed his twenties decades ago, but he still looked like he was only eighteen or nineteen years old. If he tried to go anywhere with an age limit, the bouncers and dealers would ask him for an ID, which he didn’t have because he was born in 1912, and that would raise red flags at any DMV.
	The best he could do was get a fake, but the professionals in Vegas were so good at spotting those that it wasn’t even worth the effort.
	“I’m from Albuquerque originally,” he replied openly when she asked about him. “But I migrated my way to New York before I joined the circus. That was where I met Frieda. She sort of… helped me get out of a not-so-great situation by letting me be part of the troupe.”
	Thinking of another question to keep her occupied, he queried, “If you’re from Nevada, what made you choose to come to Los Angeles?”