She looked almost sad. “Typical baby vamp. You think you know it all already. Your conscience isn’t dead, Monroe. It’s only been obscured by early-stage bloodlust. In time we learn to control that lust and more and more of our human aspect reemerges. Some of us choose to cope by suppressing the human part of our personalities, but it isn’t easy. I have a lot of blood on my hands. A lot of innocents have died because of me. I was the one who finished you off in the hot tub, you know. The one who turned you.” She moved closer to him and put a hand to his face. He was surprised to find himself trembling at her touch. “I had no choice. I did to you what I did willingly so many other times, and I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Monroe touched the back of her hand. “So you’re warning me because you feel guilty. Okay. So what am I supposed to do now?”
She smiled. “You leave the club with me. A separate squad of hunters has been dispatched here to finish off Tom and the others. The driver who brought us here is waiting for us. He’s another double agent. He’ll take us someplace safe.”
“Right. Safe. Okay. Safe is good.” His eyes narrowed some as he thought of something. “And everyone at the mansion dies? Every human, every vampire.”
“The human prisoners will be taken alive and debriefed, if possible. The corrupted human employees will be executed along with all the vampires in residence.”
Kira.
She again seemed to sense his thoughts. “You can’t help her, you know. It’s already too late.”
Monroe kept his expression blank and made himself nod. “Right. Nothing I can do against an army anyway.”
That seemed to pacify her. “And what about Tom and Lloyd?”
“What about them?”
“You’ve been bonding with them tonight. Are you okay with them dying?”
Monroe shrugged. “Whatever. They’re just characters in a bad movie anyway. Easy come, easy go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Monroe laughed.
Baby, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
“Nothing. It’s just a thing I say. Like a catchphrase.”
“It’s not a very good one.”
“That’s what everyone tells me. So…we gonna go now?”
“That’s another thing. We had to wait for the other squad to arrive.”
“So the others won’t stop us from leaving, right?”
“Right.” She glanced at the watch strapped to her slender left wrist. “They should be inside now. We can start—”
He knew the key to making it work would lie in catching her off-guard. So he waited, trying to sense the exact right moment. And then it arrived. The instant she believed he was on board with the whole scheme. He didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t. She was older and would make him pay otherwise. So he struck with what he hoped was lethal quickness, slamming her head into the side of the stall as hard as he could. The blow would have crushed a human head. It only dented Lilith’s. He pressed the attack, knowing he had to finish her fast, while she was dazed.
Her eyes were glassy, but he could see them coming back into focus. He grabbed her by the throat and propelled her savagely backward, thumping the back of her head off the concrete wall behind the toilet. There was a sharp sound that might have been her skull cracking open, but that alone would not finish her. He thought of something she’d said and made a tight fist of his other hand, thinking he’d slam it through her chest to her heart, just as she’d threatened to do to him.
He drove his fist forward.
And in the same instant saw a smile spread across her face.
Oh shit.
A hand clamped hard around his wrist, stopping the intended blow cold. He looked into her eyes and saw they were again as sharp as ever.
“It’s the girl, isn’t it? Your friend?”
Monroe’s hand was still clenched around her throat, so her words emerged as a strangled wheeze. He tried tightening his grip, bearing down with everything he had. He’d squeeze her head right off her fucking body if he could.
But she peeled his hand from her throat with disconcerting ease and smiled again. “So be it. You’ve used up the last of my good will. Now I kill you. Again.”
She acted before he could even think about fleeing. One moment he was standing there in front of her, one hand paralyzed by her grip. The next instant he was flying backward at high speed, smashing through the stall door. He continued to sail through the air until his back collided with the edge of a sink against the far wall. Pain exploded throughout his body, agony ripping at seemingly every tendon as he pitched forward, cracking his knees and then his chin on the floor tiles. He pressed his hands against the tiles, feeling their cross-hatched patterns against his palms, and tried to rise, knowing he didn’t have much time if he hoped to survive.
He raised his head and saw the hem of Lilith’s little black dress swaying as she walked calmly out of the stall. She stopped a few feet in front of him and he had a moment to admire the elegant turn of her ankles in her black heels. Then she raised one of those heels and stomped down on his outstretched right hand. The spiked heel punched through flesh and splintered bone. He screamed at the fresh agony and grabbed for her ankle with the hand that wasn’t impaled.
The room was chaos now. Other women in the room were screaming and scrambling to get out. One woman tripped and fell hard across his back, making him cry out in pain yet again. The woman stepped on his back once she got to her feet and started moving again, the sharp heel of her shoe gouging his tailbone. Yet another spike of searing pain.
Goddamn these women and their fucking lethal-weapon footwear!
Monroe’s free hand was clenched around Lilith’s ankle. He jerked hard at it to no avail. She began to grind her shoe against his hand, twisting the heel inside the raw wound and driving it in deeper. He screamed and beat at the floor with
his other hand.
Lilith laughed. “Thank you for this, Monroe. My guilty conscience is clear now. And I’m actually enjoying watching you squirm. Now squirm a little more!”
She increased the pressure on his hand, grinding more viciously this time.
He screamed and begged for mercy.
“The only mercy you’ll get is a fast death.” She laughed again. “A second one.”
Her shoe came away from his mangled hand. She grabbed him and jerked him to his feet. He’d been upright less than a full second when she spun him around and slammed him against the edge of a sink. She wrenched an arm up hard behind his back. He was effectively immobilized.
“What’s going on in here?”
Someone else came into the room. A woman, Monroe instantly knew from the sound of heels on the tiled floor. He cringed. If he somehow survived this, that sound would never again have any sexy connotations for him. Just memories of pain.
“Lilith?”
Monroe glanced to his left and saw the busty blonde vampire standing there in her shimmering red party dress. He hadn’t talked to her much, but he’d heard the others call her Melissa.
Fuck it. Might as well give it a shot.
“She’s trying to kill me.”
Melissa took pointed note of his injured hand. “What’s happening here?”
“Fucker tried to rape me.”
“Bullshit.”
Lilith twisted his arm harder, making him grit his teeth against the pain. “Shut up. It’s true, Mel. Son of a bitch tried to force himself on me.”
Melissa looked at Monroe. Her expression hadn’t changed. She gave no indication of favoring one side against the other. “Is she telling the truth?”
“Well—” He grimaced as Lilith twisted his arm still harder, a not-so-subtle warning to keep his mouth shut about certain things. But she planned to kill him anyway, so fuck it. “It’s sort of true, but she’s leaving out the part where she told me about the army of vampire hunters she’s been working with to—”
“LIAR!”
She twisted his arm yet again and shoved him against the sink.
“Dirty fucking liar!”
“Let the boy have his say, Lilith.”
Lilith was seething with anger now. “
What!?
You can’t believe his crazy fucking story! You
know
me, Mel.”
Now something like a smile twitched the edges of Melissa’s mouth. “Yes. I do. A little too well, actually.” She looked at Monroe again. “Finish what you were going to say.”
Monroe plunged ahead before Lilith could start screaming again. “She’s a spy for the hunters. Double agent. They’re hitting Victor’s place tonight and mean to kill everybody there. Another squad was sent to take out the rest of you.”
Lilith laughed at this, but Monroe detected a clear tinge of desperation in the sound. He hoped like hell Melissa heard it, too. “He’s lying, Mel. You know he is.”
“Let the boy go, Lilith.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Let him go. Now.”
To Monroe’s great surprise, Lilith relinquished her hold on him. Never one to question an unexpectedly fortuitous turn of events, he scurried immediately away from her and moved into position behind Melissa. He looked at his hand. The wound was still throbbing, but he was no longer in blinding agony. The wound even looked slightly smaller.
Melissa glanced over her shoulder at him. “It’ll heal, don’t worry. Get some fresh blood in you and you’ll be good as new in no time.” She shifted her attention back to Lilith. “Wish I could say the same for the rest of our friends.”
Lilith turned pale. Paler than usual, anyway. It was the first time Monroe had seen her look scared. He took a nasty delight in seeing this.
Melissa moved a step closer to the other vampire.
Lilith started shaking, but remained where she was. It was as if she
couldn’t
move.
Strange.
Monroe had no clue why Melissa would have such power over Lilith. He was just glad she did. Maybe it had something to do with the hierarchies of the vampire world, a subject that was still almost entirely a mystery to him. All he really knew was Melissa had saved his ass. Which meant he was Team Melissa from here on out.
Melissa took another step closer to Lilith, who was trembling all over now. She looked sort of like an animal trapped outside in a driving snowstorm. Another step closer and Lilith started to weep, tears cascading in rivers down her porcelain cheeks.
“Please…I’m sorry. Please…”
“They’re all dead, Lilith. All our friends and all your fucking hunter friends, too. I got lucky and spotted them just before they could close in. A second later and I would have been dead, too. Even so, it was a close thing.”
“I’m sorry. So sorry…”
“Stop saying that. You’re not sorry at all. You’re only sorry you got caught. You fucking traitor bitch.”
Melissa’s hands snapped outward lightning-fast, like striking snakes, and seized Lilith by the back of the head and under the chin. She snarled like a beast and gave her hands a single savage twist. Lilith’s head came free of her body with surprising ease. Despite his own close call at her hands, Monroe was surprised by the effect this had on him. He felt vaguely sick. Perhaps because it was so sudden and shocking and irreversible. Blood erupted fountain-like from the stump of Lilith’s neck. Her headless body remained upright a moment longer, before toppling over and crashing to the floor.
Melissa turned away from the corpse with a sigh. “So sad. I sired her long ago. It’s why she couldn’t flee from me or protect herself.” A melancholy expression played across her features as she stared at the head clasped in her hands. She smoothed a lock of black hair back from its forehead in an almost gentle, affectionate way. “She was one of my special ones. One of my favorites. It’s why I cut her so much slack, even when I suspected her heart wasn’t fully in this vampire thing.”
Monroe didn’t know what to say. “That, uh…too bad.”
Except that fuck no, it isn’t. Ding dong! The bitch is dead!
Melissa held the head out to him. “Here. This is for you.”
Monroe stared at her in silent stupefaction for a moment. Then he accepted the grisly gift, taking Lilith’s severed head in his hands and cradling it gingerly. It struck him that this was the second severed head he’d held in his hands in less than a day.
My life has taken a really kind of fucked turn.
Melissa moved toward the bathroom door. “Let’s go.”
Monroe hurried after her. “Where are we going?”
She talked over her shoulder as they entered the hallway outside the bathroom and kept moving. Only now did Monroe notice that the constant blare of the dance music had ceased. Except for some corpses, the hallway was deserted. “Where else? Back to the mansion.”
“But…Lilith said there’d be an army of hunters there. What can we possibly do against a fucking army?”
“Die, probably.”
“Oh.”
They emerged from the hallway into the area by the bar. Monroe glanced beyond the brass rail separating the bar area from the dance floor and saw evidence of carnage. Bodies and pieces of bodies. Great splashes of blood everywhere. “Victor sired me. I have to go. I need all the help I can get.”
“You don’t have to threaten me or anything. I’m going with you.”
They hooked a left away from the bar, heading for the club’s entrance. There was a sound of approaching sirens as they reached it.