Authors: Melody Johnson
“For years now, I’ve attempted to assimilate to your preconceptions of beauty and humanity. I’ve been very patient with you, Ian Walker. I’ve waited for you to come around, to see me as you once did, to see the truth. I’ve been very, very patient as you killed my vampires and insulted my reign and power. Now I’m thinking my patience was wasted.” Bex glanced at me and then back to Walker with a micro flick of her eyes, but I didn’t miss it and I doubt Walker did, either. “I know Lysander, and I know how he rules. He can be polished and posh when he wants to be, but that veneer is a façade. He is an animal at heart. He rules by strength and loyalty and public displays of justice. He takes what he wants in the moment without regret. Night bloods usually don’t remain night bloods very long in his territory.”
I swallowed, wanting to defend myself but not wanting to betray my arrangement with Dominic.
Bex locked eyes with me. “You’ve seen Lysander in his true form,” she asked, but her words didn’t rise at the end in question. She already knew the answer.
“Yes. I’ve seen his true form. I’ve also seen him polished and posh, as you put it. I’ve witnessed him hunt and fresh from the kill. I’ve seen him when he first rises, malnourished and skeleton-like before his first meal, and I’ve witnessed his transformation into muzzle, talons, pointed ears, flared nostrils and all. I’ve seen him in every form.”
Bex cocked her head to the side. “And you accept him? You accept that you’ll become that creature too, after your transformation?”
Bile rose in my throat at the thought of becoming that creature. I composed my expression and replied, “I anticipate it.”
“That’s enough!” Walker burst. He stood from his seat without Bex having released him. His chair shot backward and hit the wall behind us.
I shook my head. “Walker—”
“We’re leaving. Now.”
I opened my mouth to argue, my natural reaction, and then realized that leaving was exactly what I wanted. I stood. “OK.”
The kitchen, mining shaft, and back hall doors slammed shut in succession. I could hear the bolt of their locks slide into place with an audible finality that didn’t bode well for a timely exit. I walked to the door of the mining shaft anyway and tugged on the handle—call me Thomas—but the door was unmovable. It didn’t even rattle.
I turned to face Bex. She was staring at Walker and smiling. She held out her wrist to him a second time.
“Fuck you!” Walker spat.
Bex sighed, long and theatrical. “I’m sorry to hear you say that. Just one lick, Ian, that’s all I’m asking. But even to save yourself, you’re incapable of compromise.”
Rene was suddenly behind Walker, restraining his hands behind his back.
“There’s no compromising with coercion,” Walker spat, struggling against Rene’s iron grip. Walker heaved his body forward, trying to dislodge his hands and slip free. Rene didn’t budge. He didn’t even look strained.
The only blood that had spilled thus far was from Bex herself, but the optimist that I wasn’t, I stood still and silent, waiting for the strike.
My grip on the silver spray was slick from my sweaty palm.
“Rene, please escort Walker to my private chambers. I’ll be there momentarily.”
Rene nodded and began dragging Walker across the dining room. Walker turned into a spitting, cursing Tasmanian devil, but Rene didn’t even break a sweat. Despite Walker’s struggles, the two of them were nearly at the door.
I stepped forward to follow.
“It was lovely meeting you, Cassidy DiRocco. Lysander is a lucky man indeed with you at his side.” She gestured to the mining shaft. “I’ll see you out.”
I blinked. “You’ll see me out?”
Bex smiled. “I told you, my business isn’t with you.”
“I’m not leaving without Walker.”
Her smile widened, and her fangs gleamed in the candlelight. “Then you’ll be here a while.”
“Cassidy! Go! Get out of here!” Walker bellowed from across the room.
I could leave. I could go back to the safety of his house without having been bitten, bled, attacked, or in any way physically harmed tonight. I could face Ronnie, eye to eye, and say that I’d survived only by leaving Walker behind, and the woman that she was, allowing Walker to face the night alone, I think she’d understand. I think she would leave if she were standing here in my place, except she’d never be in my place because she couldn’t leave her own house. I could leave, I probably
should
leave, but I wouldn’t. If I left, I wouldn’t be able to face myself.
Walker’s life and humanity were at risk, and I couldn’t leave him to face that alone, even if it meant my own life and humanity. Over the past three weeks, I’d learned that there’s a fine line to cross to becoming a monster, and it has nothing to do with transforming into a vampire.
I could still feel a thin mental chord between Rene and me from our connection last night. It linked us, and I stroked that chord experimentally. It vibrated a low, deep bass, and I realized it wasn’t nearly as thin as I’d thought. The chord was inconsequential when ignored, silent and therefore unheard, but when I plucked at it, even gently, it expanded in a strong, deep swell of sound that was inescapable.
Rene paused in his struggles with Walker. He looked up at me, his mouth a wide O.
“Rene Roland,” I commanded, and the chord struck a loud, demanding note between us. “Release Walker and restrain B—”
A blur of movement knocked the silver spray from my hand, and I was suddenly smashed on my back into the stone floor. Bex’s hand squeezed around my throat, cutting short my command. She’d moved like Dominic could move, faster than my brain synapses could fire, and her strength was incredible. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to flex my neck to sip a hiss of air between the squeeze of her fingers, but struggling against her was useless. If she truly wanted to kill me, I had no doubt that she could break my neck with a simple twitch of her fingers. She could twist and pull with the inhuman strength in her arms and decapitate my head from my body without straining a muscle.
She watched me impartially for a moment, her luminous yellow-green eyes scanning my face. Walker was free from Rene and threatening Bex. She ignored him, obviously unconcerned by his threats, but she eased the pressure from my throat slightly. I gasped, squeaking a thin stream of air into my starved lungs before she closed her grip on my throat again.
Walker had missed it. He was still shouting and waving one of his weapons in her direction, and he’d missed that she was letting me breath.
She wasn’t letting me live for his benefit.
Bex doesn’t want to break the alliance,
I realized. She was actually reining in her strength, restraining herself to only choking me, but even that was a ruse if she was letting me breathe.
She allowed a few more stolen sips of air into my lungs. When she closed her grip again, cutting off my air supply, I gasped and choked—ineffectual but desperate for more—like sucking ice cream through a straw. She was letting me live, but I wouldn’t last long without more than a few sips of air. Black spots and bright starbursts were starting to cloud my vision, and my neck was burning.
At first, I thought the pressure of her vise-like grip was straining my throat, but the burning became intensely focused. A thin whisp of noxious steam sizzled between us, similar to the sizzle of vampires being burned by silver.
My necklace.
The silver chain should have protected me, but instead of pulling away when the necklace burned her hands, she squeezed tighter, embedding the necklace deeper into my throat as it scorched both of us.
I opened my mouth to scream, but I couldn’t breathe in, and the scream couldn’t escape out. Something like cinnamon and cloves dripped into my open mouth and over my tongue. That persistent, addictive itch beneath my skin flamed to life, and my eyes, like laser targets, focused with inhuman clarity on the source of that stolen drop.
Her blood. The wound on her wrist was still bleeding, and as she twisted to ward off Walker, a warm drop dripped into my open mouth.
Jillian roared inside my head.
SWALLOW!
Between Bex’s hands around my neck choking me, Jillian’s voice screaming at me, and my own desperation to breathe, I did the unthinkable. I swallowed Bex’s blood.
The itch beneath my skin became claws, as if something alive and unbidden was trying to escape from inside me. Walker did something to her then, I couldn’t see what, but Bex turned to fend him off. Her wrist grazed my lips, and the suppressed creature inside me burst free. I sealed my lips around the wound at Bex’s wrist, sucked a mouthful of her blood, and swallowed.
Like a soothing balm, the blood soaked under my skin, dampening the flames. I couldn’t move for a moment. Jillian sighed across the mental twine between us, and instant relief swept over me in a numbing, limp lethargy. I stared overhead, letting the blood overtake my body, and then like a sudden backdraft, the blazing itch returned. It scorched up my throat like fire, and I realized the craving was neverending. I wanted more blood. I’d always want more blood.
Why can’t Walker want me like that?
The thought was in my mind, but it wasn’t my own and it wasn’t from Jillian. Unlike the other thoughts Bex had projected at me, it wasn’t a command either. She was just watching me and thinking a simple thought without intending for me to hear.
But I’d heard.
I could hear all of her—the Master of New York State, Rene’s maker, Walker’s protector—everything within her heart that composed her being. I could feel the heat of her blood nourishing her muscles. I could hear the snap of synapses, like a network of neurons throughout her nerves, firing over her arms and legs, allowing her that blinding speed and unimaginable strength vampires naturally possessed. I could see her still, physically useless human heart, which was still broken. She had walls that, even with my newfound connection, I couldn’t scale, but the connection I did have was more than enough for my purposes.
Get the fuck off me!
I thought.
Bex’s hands released my neck instantly. She stared down at her palms, pure, dumbfounded shock blanking her expression.
“I heard you inside my head,” she whispered. Her voice shook as she met my gaze. “And I listened to your command.”
I gasped, struggling to breathe through my bruised throat and coughing instead.
Rene was suddenly beside me, his arm behind my shoulders to help me sit up. “Are you OK?” he asked.
I looked askance at Rene and nodded. Walker was standing next to Bex, inexplicably checking the time on his wristwatch. I narrowed my eyes on him, wondering why Rene was the one helping me up.
“You don’t look OK. Breathe in slowly.” Rene advised. “I’m sorry that things escalated so quickly. You should have left when you had the chance.”
I didn’t have the wind to breathe yet, slowly or otherwise. I couldn’t stop coughing.
“You don’t even know my full name,” Bex said, staring alternately at me and her betraying palms. “All you needed was a sip of my blood, and I was yours to command.”
“I’m guessing that doesn’t happen often,” I croaked, finally catching my breath.
Bex’s smile was weary. “Not in a very, very long time. I don’t suppose that you—”
Walker tapped the face of his watch, and Bex’s hands whipped up to cover her face. She doubled over, shrieking a high, piercing wail from behind her hands.
Walker hadn’t been checking the time. He’d been aiming.
Rene was gone from my side, and just as quickly, Walker was missing a chunk of flesh from his neck. He screamed and covered the wound with his hand just as another chunk was ripped from his shoulder. Walker backed up wildly, aiming his watch while he backpedaled, but his watch and the flesh under it tore violently from his wrist. Blood spurted from the wound.
I opened my mouth to command Rene to stop.
Walker tripped backward, cracked his head on the corner of the dining room table, and hit the floor hard.
Rene stopped the attack without being commanded. I scrambled across the floor to kneel next to Walker and help him, but something was wrong. He was moving strangely and not getting back to his feet.
I put pressure on the wound at his wrist with my own hand, the deepest of the Rene’s bites. “Walker? Can you talk to me?”
Walker vomited. His eyes rolled back, and his body shook violently.
“Oh God.” I knelt beside Walker and cupped his head to protect it from hitting the stone floor. “You’re OK. You’re going to be OK,” I said, more for my benefit than his. I didn’t know enough about seizures to know if he could hear me or not.
My heart sank as my brain caught up to what I was seeing. Walker was having a seizure.
Bex rushed beside me. I glanced up at her, and despite the urgency of the situation, I stared. Walker had shot Bex in the eye. One of the hands from his wristwatch was imbedded deep in the center of her iris. Blood and a thicker, more viscous liquid dripped over her cheek like tears as she blinked around the protruding watch hand.
Rene was staring at Bex, too. “Master,” he whispered, and that one word said it all.
I’d witnessed vampires heal worse wounds—Dominic had expelled an entire spray of silver bullets from his body and stood moments later like the injury had never occurred—but it was her
eye
. I had a very bad feeling that if she attempted to pull the watch hand free, she’d pull her eye out with it. Evidently, Rene was thinking the same thing.
Bex ignored Rene and dropped to her knees next to me.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“He tripped backward and hit his head. Obviously he hit it hard if he’s—” I couldn’t finish my sentence.
My throat was already swollen from being choked, but now it clogged with tears. I tried to swallow them back, but they flowed down my cheeks in a hot panic.
“You’re going to be fine, Walker.” I repeated. “Just hang in there.”
“It was an accident,” Rene added. “He shot you, and I was protecting—”
Bex held up her hand to Rene, and he fell silent.
“He’s having a seizure,” she said, her voice calm and steady.
I nodded.
“He’s had these before, twice recently that I know of, since returning home from the city. The doctors say it’s not uncommon for those who suffer from TBI.”