Last Chance Academy

by Alex Lidell

  And when I open the heavy door of Dusk, the nightclub Ellis told me to go to, I can tell immediately that it’s not good enough. I almost step right back out onto the street. For something that looks so shady from the outside, Dusk is the most upscale club I’ve ever seen. Gleaming walnut floors, a wall-to-wall bar with lit-up shelves of liquor that must be worth more than most people’s cars, and thong-clad dancers decorating six pure-white marble pedestals. Their polished skin and long, swinging hair glow in the low light, fangs unsheathed as they smile alluringly at the patrons, male and female alike. And just in case you can’t get a good look at the girls from where you are, each of the dancers is also projected on the large-screen televisions hanging like lust from the high ceiling. I’m not into girls, but even I think they’re hot.

  Strobe lights sway along to the music, slowing down to settle on a man sitting just behind the shiniest Steinway grand piano I’ve seen, even on TV. My mouth waters with longing. With short dark hair and a black Italian suit cut to perfection, the man caresses the piano keys with a lover’s anticipation, the background music quieting instantly as he brushes the first note.

  The sound vibrating through the air makes me freeze, every nerve in my body strained toward it. The man’s long pale fingers race over the keys with a mix of practiced precision and fiery passion that makes the whole club hold a collective breath in deference. His gorgeous, sharp-boned face remains relaxed, only his dark eyes betraying his concentration. Fucking hell, I could listen to that piano for the rest of my life and be happy.

  “Well, look who strayed far from the nest.” A hand cups my jeans-covered backside and squeezes hard. I’m turning around before I can judge the wisdom of it, my fist heading straight for the groper’s nose.

  The man catches my wrist easily, his bald head and leather biker jacket both reflecting the colorful overhead light. Large and ugly, and more than a little drunk, the man yanks me toward him, fangs already half-unsheathed. “There’s a reason you little caddies aren’t allowed at Dusk.”

  Yeah. Ellis never mentioned that part.

  I try to knee him, for all the good it’s doing. “I’m here to see Cassis,” I snap, trying to make it sound like a threat. Though, given Ellis’s setup, Cassis might be a bloody pet newt for all I know.

  The man snorts. Apparently, I said something funny. “And why do you need Cassis?”

  I swallow, the piano continuing its song, the chords coming faster than before. My heart quickens, my body writhing to get away. “None of your business,” I snarl, filling my lungs to scream. I’ll make a scene if I have to. “Let me go or—”

  The man’s dark eyes catch mine, his irises turning from brown to black as the pupils dilate. My body stops moving, my mind suddenly sluggish, hazy.

  “Explain what you want with Cassis,” the man repeats, his tone so deep that it fills my whole skull, gripping it like a toxin. Words tumble from me, the words I’ve been wanting to say since Ellis first dangled the hope of answers before me.

  “I’m a witch. I heard Cassis could help me.”

  The music stops, the temperature in the whole room suddenly dropping several notches. The man who captured me tosses me roughly to the floor. When I look up, the back of his hand is raised high, the knuckles having already marked my face for a target.

  My heart pounds, my shoulders hunched for inevitable impact. Idiot. I was a fucking idiot to believe Ellis.

  “Hal,” a smooth, powerful voice, like a river rushing over stones, cuts in from just outside my vision. “Let yourself out. You know the rules about touching girls.”

  My attacker steps back at once, his palms rising into the air. “Cassis, she said—”

  “I heard.” The speaker steps into view and grips Hal’s gaze. It’s the piano player, even more terrifyingly beautiful standing over me than he was sitting at the Steinway. “Get out,” Cassis snaps, that rushing river of a voice turning into a tsunami.

  Hal’s already pale face blanches further, his boots scraping as he retreats toward the exit mumbling things I can’t make out because Cassis now turns his attention to me. He wears a dark red shirt, the liquid silk as rich as blood, the collar unbuttoned enough to reveal the top of a muscled chest. The well-tailored black suit he wears over it has a Versace logo, the cloth hugging the taut body in just the right places to make my chest tighten with more than just fear. As for his face…

  I swallow as I meet high cheekbones, a sculpted jaw, and rich brown eyes, the lashes so dark, they look painted. But I know they’re not. His beauty is as real as the power pulsating around him like lingering notes of a piano.

  “Show is over.” Cassis raises a hand and waves, the single motion sending the frozen club right back to their dancing and conversation, the DJ kicking off recorded music. Looking down at where I’m still kneeling on the floor, the man adjusts one of his golden cuff links, his dangerously gorgeous face as unreadable as the rest of him. “I imagine someone played a joke on you when they sent you here,” he says, his clipped British tones reminding me of Reese’s, spiked with cockiness. “You aren’t a vampire.”

  No shit.

  “Dusk isn’t for you. Go back to school and find yourself a pack.” He cocks his head. “Unless, of course, you are really a witch.”

  I get to my feet. “And if I am?”

  Cassis gives me a devastating smile that never touches his dark eyes. ”Then you will never have a pack. You will never be safe.”

  Yeah, well, tell me something new. I raise my hand in a mock salute. “Right. Sorry I disturbed your music.”

  Cassis’s gaze catches my eyes, the brown in his own darkening just like Hal’s did. “Leave.”

  “Yeah, interview’s over. I got the message.” I flash him my middle finger and snort at his sudden confusion. Maybe no one has ever dared to flip Cassis off before. Then again, there might be a very good reason for that—one that I shouldn’t wait around to discover. I start toward the door.

  “Wait.”

  “Indecisive much?” I turn, finding Cassis staring at me with renewed interest. Like a wolf watching an unusual little porcupine. “What?”

  Cassis’s eyes grip me again, their color changing to darkness. “Spin around for me.” His murmur drops to a lower seductive orbit that makes my sex clench. “Let me get a good look at that gorgeous ass.”

  “Right. We are done.” I take a step back, inwardly cursing. I’m going to kill Ellis. I will fucking work out a way to do it.

  Cassis grabs my chin, his cold fingers and expensive musky scent sending a shiver through my body. “Fascinating.”

  My heart jumps, my muscles waking to action.

  “Relax,” Cassis orders, his eyes wholly black as he releases me but stays close. Too close.

  I shove him in the chest with all my strength, which moves him not an inch but knocks me back several steps—right into a tall table with a bottle of cognac and several priceless crystal glasses. At least they certainly sound priceless when they—and I, and the table—all crash to the floor, the ring of shattering crystal as pure as the notes of Cassis’s piano. As the piercing pain reaches my brain, I realize that I didn’t just break several glasses, I landed right on them.

  A thick trickle of blood covers the heel of my hand and wrist, running onto the floor and soaking the bottom hem of the white lace cami I’m wearing under my jacket. When I raise my hand to examine it better, several soft hungry growls sound from around the room. A moment later, I realize the crowd is slowly closing in on me, all eyes on my wound. On my neck. On my blood. The brunette dancer runs the tip of her tongue over her sharpened canines.

  A shiver runs down my spine.

  “She’s mine,” Cassis snaps, and the entire crowd takes an instinctive step back.

  When Cassis extends his hand to me, I’m smart enough to take it, something telling me that I’m not walking out of Dusk in one piece otherwise.

  14

  Sam

  The music rises to new volumes as I follow Cassis out
the back door behind the bar and up a well-lit staircase to a softly illuminated landing above the club. Cassis opens the door, standing aside to let me into a vast modern flat, floor-to-ceiling windows showing the full expanse of the night sky. As in the club downstairs, there’s a bar with top-shelf alcohol at one end of the room and a grand piano beside that. For some reason, the piano makes me feel safer, as if music can somehow protect me.

  In the center of the room, sleek brown leather couches surround a heavy marble coffee table whose iron-clawed legs curl in a design that reminds me of a woman’s body.

  “I had those commissioned especially for my den,” Cassis says, his accent making everything sound just a little more polished than it has any right to be. He strides over to the bar. Given the resemblance between upstairs and down, I’m fairly certain Cassis actually owns Dusk. “What do you drink?” he asks.

  Whatever’s cheapest. Usually water.

  “Never mind, I’ll surprise you.” Taking out two glasses, he fills one with scotch and the other with something thick and purple and fruity smelling. I get that one.

  Taking the drink in my good hand, I squint at the writing on the bottle my drink came from and roll my eyes. “Cassis. You poured me a cassis liqueur.”

  “It’s as close as you’ll ever come to having me inside you,” Cassis says. “I couldn’t deprive you of that little.”

  I put down my drink, the tiny sip I took tingling the inside of my mouth. Cassis liqueur is thicker and stronger than I expected. And the fact that I just thought those particular words, even in the privacy of my head, is wrong on so many levels.

  Cassis grins.

  “Right.” I help myself to a cloth from his bar and wrap it around my hand. “You don’t want me here. I don’t want to be here. So how about you take me out the back door like a hooker and we call the evening quits.”

  “I take my hookers out the front door,” Cassis informs me, his dark hooded eyes telling me that he’s only half kidding. He’s still standing, towering over me like a predator. “And you can’t leave. You broke a very valuable bottle and glasses. You owe me.”

  My jaw tightens. “If I had any money, do you think I’d be going anywhere dressed like this?” I motion to the bloodstained white cami about two sizes too small for my breasts, and my tight black jeans, wearing through in one knee. “These are my nice pants.”

  “No, I don’t imagine you would.” A corner of Cassius’s full mouth tugs slightly. “But there are ways around it.”

  Oh, so this is how he wants to play it. My pulse jumps, my eyes darting to the door he forgot to lock after letting me in. If I move quickly enough—

  “Didn’t I already tell you that you are getting no closer to feeling me inside you than my namesake there?” Cassis sits himself across from me on one of the leather couches and crosses one ankle over the other knee, the fine Italian weave stretching over his muscled legs—and the bulge between them. I do everything I can not to look at it—and fail. “You can work it off. I need a bartender.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He shrugs a shoulder, watching his drink swirl around his glass before taking an indulgent sip. “Mmmm.” He licks his lips. “True. But I want one. And seeing as you’ve no other way of repaying me, it seems you’re hard pressed to say no.”

  I throw up my hands, wincing as my injured arm moves more than it should. The mixed signals coming from the man are starting to drive me certifiable. Ellis must be having a great laugh right now. “Why?” I demand, as if I have any standing in this conversation. “I seem to remember clearly you wanting to throw me out of Dusk and onto my ass less than ten minutes ago.”

  “But you didn’t go,” Cassis says, as if that’s supposed to explain something.

  “Is that a novelty for you?”

  “It is.” He lifts a dark brow.

  I look at the door again, knowing I should be a great deal more scared than I am being alone in this man’s—male’s—flat. Yet there is a strange kind of fascination that keeps me here too, a dull tug deep in my core.

  Or maybe there’s nothing strange about it. Let’s face it, one glance at Cassis’s devastatingly beautiful face would have any girl—and many guys—writhing in their underwear. I push my thighs together, and another fleeting smile touches Cassis’s mouth, as if he is well aware of where my thoughts strayed to.

  More likely he just assumes everything is about him.

  I put down my drink and sit, cringing as the blood from my cut arm drips onto the polished leather. “If you’re going to add the cleaning to my debt, can I have a bigger towel or something to keep down the damage?”

  Cassis frowns, his brow creasing in a way that instantly transforms his face from mischief to intensity. Rising, he disappears into an adjacent room, returning a few moments later with a leather bag that looks like something the doctor on Little House on the Prairie carried around.

  Setting the bag on the coffee table, Cassis pulls out a leather case with medical tools and a large syringe, the latter wrapped in the sterile blister pack that is most definitely from the modern century. A small vial follows, Cassis expertly piercing the top with a hypodermic needle and injecting a bit of air into the vial before drawing up a clear liquid. Turning the syringe needle up, Cassis depresses the plunger until a bead of moisture crowns the sharp tip and shines menacingly against the recess lights. “Give me your hand.”

  “When pigs fly.” I’m on my feet before the words are out of my mouth, putting a good two paces of distance between us. “If you think I’m letting you inject me with anything, think again.”

  Cassis tosses me the vial he just drew from. “It’s lidocaine.”

  “You fancy yourself some kind of doctor?” I ask.

  That amused smile cuts across his sensuous mouth again. “I have a medical degree or five.”

  “Playing hospital in nursery school doesn’t count.” Cassis looks barely thirty—though I know looks have nothing to do with it when it comes to immortals. “I don’t care what label you put on your drugs, you aren’t injecting me with anything.”

  “As you wish.” Cassis depresses the plunger on the syringe, letting all the clear liquid squirt into the air. “Would you prefer I hand you the tweezers and you can pull the shards out yourself? I hear it can be pleasant, feeling each tiny little piece cut the flesh just a bit deeper as it moves.”

  Bile rises up my throat, but just to prove to him that I can, I walk over and grab a pair of bent grippy things from his leather torture collection. Then I take one look at my hand, watch the room spin, and toss the damn things back on the table—or try to, the round grips tangling on my suddenly clumsy fingers.

  Powerful hands brace my back and legs before I can fall, lifting me easily onto the couch. Cassis crouches beside me. His cologne smells of sin and spice, and there’s a fresh scent of shampoo wafting from his hair. Even though he holds himself very still, I can feel the tension roaring inside his body, as if beneath the easy motions and cocky jests, he’s fighting against himself.

  “Do you really not understand what would happen if you walked through Dusk like this?” Cassis asks, his gaze gripping mine, his impossibly broad shoulders filling my vision. The intensity of his deep-chocolate eyes now tempers that playboy image he gave off down in the club. “Do you understand who I am?” Cassis’s voice is low. “What am I?”

  “A vampire, right?” I snort lightly. “Fae, vampires, witches. I got it.”

  Cassis doesn’t smile back. “You have no understanding of what that means, though, do you?” he says, rubbing his hand over his face. “Hell take me.”

  15

  Cassis

  Cassis was going to disembowel Ellis. What was the idiot thinking, sending Samantha to Dusk to say she was a witch, even as a joke? The girl had to be a demi, with no concept of the danger she was in coming here—and she wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, that small gorgeous body packing a fire-filled soul that filled his entire club the moment she’d entered. Samantha had
woken something inside Cassis, which he didn’t think was possible anymore. Not after Sienna.

  Curiosity. That was all Cassis was feeling. His compulsion failed on Samantha, and that alone was fascinating. That, and the naïveté.

  “How long have you known about the other species?” he asked, settling beside Sam on the couch. Pulling a throw pillow onto his lap, he pulled the girl’s injured hand gently atop it, a zing of possessive energy shooting through him as his skin brushed hers. She was tense. Hurt and scared, but scared of all the wrong things.

  “Ten days.” She swallowed.

  Cassis snorted. “Let me guess, the only full vampires you met until today were Academy instructors?”

  Sam nodded, fine-boned face pale as he inspected her cuts.

  “Ellis is one sick bastard,” he muttered, willing to bet his fangs that the bastard was behind this little visit. Gripping Sam’s hand firmly enough to stabilize it, Cassis used the tweezers to pluck the first small shard of glass free. Bloody hell, but it felt good to see Sam’s small shoulders relax a fraction as she realized it didn’t hurt as badly as she clearly feared. It would have hurt even less if she’d allowed Cassis to numb it, but he respected the caution.

  He just wished it was aimed in the right direction.

  “Word of advice—don’t bleed in front of vampires you don’t know. It’s like walking into a club in nothing but a thong and expecting not to be propositioned.” Cassis weighed Sam with his gaze and, deciding that she was unlikely to pass out if he stood her up, put a hand in the small of her back. The couple of shards were out, and he wanted to run some water over that hand to get a better look at the damage.

  He wouldn’t mind running some water over himself while he was at it. Some very, very cold water.

  “Fine, I’ll bite,” said Sam, the corners of Cassis’s mouth twitching at her choice of words, even as the way her body accepted his support made his chest tighten. “If I’m all that appetizing to vampires, how are you here not drinking me dry?”