I gasped as she dropped to her knees and took his semi-hard cock into her mouth. His mouth opened in pleasure as she deep-throated him expertly, all the while walking her ruby-tinted fingers along the muscles of his pelvis. And then, without a warning, she replaced her mouth with one hand and snapped forward like a cobra to sink her teeth into the flesh of his upper thigh.
“Number sixty-eight,” said the voice as Craig jerked and came all over the stage. Spontaneous applause burst from the audience. I expected the first vampire to leave as a tall man approached to take his taste, but she remained on her knees, throat pulsing greedily. Craig’s hands were in her hair now, but whether to pull her closer or push her away, I couldn’t tell. The man circled behind both of them and licked from Craig’s shoulder to the crook of his elbow before sinking in his teeth. He cried out quietly. The crowd hummed.
I turned to Val. Her teeth were clenched and her hands balled into fists. At first, I thought she was angry—but when I gently reached up to tilt her head toward mine, I realized that the tension in her body was born of equal parts thirst and the fierce need to fight it. “We have to do something,” I said urgently. “They’re killing him.”
Val shook her head as though breaking out of a daze. She scanned the room, but her face was grim. “What can we do? These guys will tear us to shreds if we try to interfere.”
The voice called out another number. Craig swayed on his feet, weakening fast. I wondered if he had realized that he was going to die. Behind me, Val was vibrating with tension. Did she see herself in the vampires bleeding him dry? Or in him, a victim at the nonexistent mercy of these monsters? I would never have told her this, but he reminded me of my weaker, human self on that fateful night when she had taken too much.
I fished my phone out of my jeans pocket. “I have Detective Foster’s cell on speed dial. Maybe—” The announcer cut me off with the next winner.
“Number three-hundred and four.”
The noise level of the room dipped as the crowd waited for the next winner to come forward. But there was no ripple of movement toward the stage, and after a few seconds, the voice repeated the number.
Val frowned suddenly. “What did you say my number was again?”
The masses began to chant.
Three-oh-four! Three-oh-four!
I looked down at the ticket in my hand. “Oh my God.”
“No!” Val grated, her arms tightening around me so fiercely that I winced. It was almost as though she expected to be dragged up to the stage, kicking and screaming, and be forced to drink from Craig’s fading body.
And then I realized that her thirst was doing just that. Karma had once called a Were’s psychic battle “epic,” but watching Valentine’s face, I knew that the same description applied to the effort required from any vampire who fought against their compulsion. Cupping her face in my hands, I forced her to focus on me instead of on the horrific spectacle unfolding onstage. “You’re mine,” I whispered urgently. “I’m yours. And I’m not sharing you with anyone.”
It must have been what she needed to hear, because she sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Yeah,” she murmured, not looking away despite the clamor of the crowd. “Yeah.”
“No three-oh-four?” the voice sounded surprised. “Very well, then. Congratulations, number one hundred sixty-eight—yours is the privilege of last blood.”
As the last vampire was greeted with raucous cheers and whistles, the crowd surged around us like a starving beast. They were chanting in unison for last blood. I realized then that I couldn’t call Foster. I couldn’t call anybody. It would be like leading lambs to the slaughter.
I watched a bead of sweat snake down Val’s neck, sliding directly over the pulse point that throbbed visibly beneath her skin. This lottery had blindsided her, and she was suffering. It was clearly time for us to get out of here.
“Come on, love,” I said, reaching for her hand. “Let’s go.”
She didn’t protest. We made our way slowly toward the hallway through the jam of people. I looked over my shoulder once; Craig was unconscious, held up only by his chained hands. A few seconds later, a loud roar shook the foundations of the club.
He was dead.
“Leaving already?” the Hispanic woman asked as we returned to the atrium. Neither of us answered her. “Fresh meat, so sensitive,” she teased as Val collected her gun and I grabbed our jackets. “You’ll be back.”
Unfortunately, I suspected that she was right. We still hadn’t made any progress in our search for the rogue vampire. Val hurried through the passageway to the outside door. She didn’t speak until we emerged into the night air.
“We need to go see Helen. Right now.”
“She’s the Master of this city, Val. Don’t you think she knows?”
“I don’t care whether she knows or not. I won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t do something.” She shook her head, hard. “That wasn’t a shifter who knew exactly what the fuck he was doing, even if it was insane. That was some poor, drugged-up human SOB who died just because he didn’t have a home!”
I squeezed her hand tightly, able to hear what she wasn’t saying. Not to bring this to Helen’s attention—not to try at all—would make Valentine feel like she was jeopardizing her own humanity.
Val was quiet for the entire train ride. Her internal struggle was palpable, and I wished that I could read her mind. I kept one hand on her knee the entire time, knowing that she would derive some measure of comfort from my nearness. I needed that closeness, too. I had watched a man die for sport again tonight. To most of the people in that room, Craig’s demise had been a titillating game, designed to stimulate and satiate their most primal desires: to hunt, to feed, to grow stronger.
I leaned back in the plastic bucket seat and stared unseeing at the ads that checkered the walls of the train. Unlike our first foray into the Red Circuit, the carnage made a kind of sense now. To my panther half, hunting down and consuming prey that was weak seemed like the most natural impulse in the world. It was natural selection at its simplest; only the strong would survive, and Craig had been wasting away before the vampires ever found him.
What had happened tonight was inexcusable to a part of me. But to the other part, it was natural. Even…right.
When we arrived at the Consortium, Val didn’t so much as pause before marching up to the receptionist. “We need to see Helen as soon as possible,” she said, her tone brooking no arguments. I wondered if she really felt so black and white about what had just happened, or whether there was some piece of her that, like me, could justify it. Then again, if that was the case, perhaps it was her disgust at that aspect of herself that drove her now.
The receptionist looked Val up and down. I ground my teeth. She pretended not to notice. “You can have five minutes. But don’t you dare push it, or I’ll never let you in to see her without an appointment again.”
I expected Val to bristle at this woman’s patronizing tone, but she merely nodded. We rode the elevator up to Helen’s penthouse office in silence. We didn’t even have to knock; we were still a few feet shy of Helen’s door when she called for us to come in.
She was seated behind her desk before the floor-to-ceiling windows, untinted now that it was night. The windows revealed an impressive view of the U.N. building swathed in spotlights. Her lips curved slightly when she saw us. “Valentine. Alexa. You look like you’ve been enjoying your Friday evening.”
“We went to the Red Circuit,” said Val, ignoring Helen’s gestured invitation to sit in the lavish leather chairs arrayed before her desk.
“And you want to know why I haven’t put a stop to it.” Helen didn’t seem surprised. It was comforting to know that we weren’t the first members of our community to come to her with these concerns.
Val’s jaw was clenched tightly, the small muscles beneath her jaw all bunched together. “A man died tonight, Helen. A nonconsensual, human murder. That never has to happen.”
Helen leaned forward, sliding her folded hands along the polished wood surface. “What you’re carefully not asking is indeed possible. I could shut down the Red Circuit. But I never have, and I will not, for the simple reason that it is a known evil. And the unknown evil would be much more dangerous.”
Val opened her mouth to speak, but Helen didn’t let her. “Consider the benefits of the current system. The Circuit knows that I am watching, and that knowledge puts a check on its controversial practices. Yes, humans die. But, as you no doubt saw tonight, they are carefully culled from the ranks of the weak and pitiful.”
It was disconcerting to hear Helen vocalizing my thought process from earlier. She stood then, and turned her back to us, hands hanging loose at her sides. “Picture, in contrast, a Circuit without traditions, determined to flout the tyrannical policing that is always one step behind them. That would be anarchy. Infinitely more destructive.”
A wave of anger swept through me at her dismissive justification. “That logic is ridiculous. Val is right. No one ever has to die. You told her that yourself, at the beginning of all of this—vampires have to feed, but they don’t have to kill.”
Helen turned her cold gray eyes on me, and it was a struggle not to take a step back. “If it bothers you so much,” she said quietly, voice tinged with menace, “then why did you go back?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. And hiding it was impossible. I looked to Val, expecting her to answer—it was her show, after all. But instead of explaining to Helen that we had gone in pursuit of the rogue vampire that her task force still had not apprehended, Valentine hesitated. In the pause, I began to wonder. If Helen condoned the Circuit as a necessary evil, then what else did she know about that she was similarly overlooking? What if catching Val’s attacker wasn’t one of her top priorities? Malcolm had insinuated as much, and more. Maybe she considered Valentine—and almost Olivia—to be affordable or unavoidable casualties. The thought made me bristle, and I bit down on my lip to stifle the growl that wanted release.
“Monique only showed us the dogfighting,” Val said smoothly. “We got curious about the rest of it.” Which wasn’t a lie per se, just not nearly the full truth.
“And now you don’t have to be any longer.” Helen returned to her chair, opened a manila folder, and began to read the document inside. Clearly, our five minutes were up. As we walked slowly back toward the elevator, I felt the first twinges of fatigue. It had been a long, emotional night. All I wanted was to climb inside the cocoon of our cool sheets, snuggle into the curve of Val’s naked body, and fall into sleep. I wondered if I’d be able to shut my eyes without seeing Craig’s face. Or Gwendolyn’s.
“I’m glad you didn’t tell her the whole truth,” I said as the doors dinged behind us. “I’m starting to suspect that she doesn’t really give a crap about catching him.”
Val nodded, standing just close enough so that our arms brushed. “You may be right.” I watched her left hand tighten on the railing. “Damn it. I trusted her.”
The doors opened and we hurried out into the chill night. Thankfully, we caught a cab almost immediately. I tucked one arm around Val’s waist and rested my head in the dip between her neck and shoulder as the taxi pulled away from the curb.
“I guess…when you’ve been alive as long as she has, your priorities change. You forget how to be human.”
“I don’t want to forget,” Val whispered. She sounded absolutely terrified, like a little girl afraid of the dark. It was, I realized, a much more immediate fear for her than for me. My blood was holding the advance of her parasite in check. Without me, so the legend went, she would lose the tether that kept her connected to humanity.
But I would never allow that to happen.
I gently kissed her neck. “You won’t. We won’t. We’ll never forget, as long as we’re together.”
“Forever.” Her voice held a note of forlornness, the single word half statement, half question. I thumbed open the bottom button of her coat and rubbed my palm in gentle circles over the light swell of her stomach, hoping to comfort her.
“Yes, my love. Forever.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I ran. The long grass of the savannah bent before me, paying homage to the speed of my passage. Ahead, my prey soared in leaping bounds, zigzagging gracefully around the occasional stunted tree. I maintained my pace easily. The young gazelle would tire before I did, and then she would be mine. I could almost taste her now: the hot spurt of her blood against my tongue, the sharp crack of her bones between my teeth, her moist, tender flesh sliding down my throat.
The wind blowing off the distant desert flowed around me, carrying with it a renewed burst of her enticing scent. I ran faster, now, restless for the kill. And then, she stumbled.
It was the barest misstep, the slightest imaginable pause, but it was enough. Mid-stride, I coiled every muscle and sprang. My claws pierced through her light coat of fur, tearing into the muscle beneath. She screamed and went down. I shifted my weight as she fell, pinning her to the earth. She struggled beneath me, but my weight held her easily. I took a moment to savor my triumph—her wild, rolling eyes, the pulse racing in her throat, the fragrant scent of her blood.
Flicker.
The body beneath me blurred, becoming human. Skin and bones and lanky brown hair. Craig. He looked up at me in terror, too frightened even to tremble.
Flicker.
The bluest eyes. I snarled into Valentine’s face as she tried desperately to pull away. My paws held down her shoulders, claws digging into her skin. She flinched. And yet, I hesitated. This didn’t feel right. Her expression was panicked, just like my usual quarries. She didn’t want to die. She thrashed against my grip and almost managed to pull free. I dug my claws in harder and she whimpered in pain and fear. A thread of saliva dangled from my curled lips; she was the most delectable creature I’d ever hunted, and finally, finally I was going to sate my hunger. Her eyes rolled wildly I as I tensed for the lunge that would break her neck…