“Oh my God,” I said, realization dawning. “The Record—it must be how many lashes a shifter can take before she transforms.”
I tipped my head back to meet Val’s look of horror. “That’s…
that’s sick,” she whispered, clutching me even tighter, trying to shield me with her body. “Don’t watch. Or better yet—let’s just go.”
“No,” I said forcefully, twisting just enough in Val’s embrace so that I could continue watching the tableau. “It’s…it’s not that bad. We’re staying.” The panther growled inside me, disagreeing, but I had made up my mind and she wasn’t riled enough to wrest control just yet.
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“Not that bad?” Val echoed me skeptically. But my resolve must have been apparent, because she didn’t say anything else. By now, I had lost count. The crowd hadn’t, though. Thirty-eight, they chanted. Thirty-nine. Gwendolyn’s back was covered in blood; I couldn’t even see any skin left between her shoulders and hip bones. The urge to vomit came on strong, and I buried my face in Val’s bicep, breathing in her familiar, comforting scent. No, I had to keep it together. I was getting seriously stressed out, and that would only end badly. Besides, how ironic would it be if I succumbed to the urge to protect myself before Gwendolyn did?
Val was rhythmically stroking the long muscles of my back. “It’s okay, baby,” she kept saying. “It’s okay.” I forced myself to stand still and watch as Gwendolyn took her strokes. Valentine’s arms around me kept me grounded, kept me human.
Forty-six! Forty-seven!
And then Gwendolyn began to shudder. I felt a strange kind of admiration as I watched her fight the impulse—her fingertips scraped against the pole, and her face contorted in an expression of extreme concentration mingled with agony. But she was losing this battle. Her other self was determined to take over, now, pulled from hibernation by the call of the cat.
I expected the wielder of the whip to hightail it out of there at the first sign of a transformation, but she only continued to raise her arm—up, down. Up, down. Fifty. God, she was strong. Fifty-one. Gwendolyn’s spine arched into an impossible bow. Her scream as she folded in on herself was abruptly cut off, only to reemerge as a long, low, snarling growl. Where once a broken, bloodied woman had fought to remain upright against the pole, now a huge Bengal tiger crouched, her attention fixed on the perpetrator of her torture. Deep inside my brain, the panther howled in triumph, urging her sister-tiger to take vengeance on her tormenter.
Those red lips lifted in a cruel smile. With one powerful contraction of its haunch muscles, Gwendolyn the tiger leapt—only to be jerked back by the chain around her neck. The tiger whined and snarled in frustration.
The woman wielding the whip calmly drew the gun at her left side, firing into the belly of the beast she had summoned. Gwendolyn
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lurched forward several times before she finally collapsed. I bit down hard on Val’s arm to stifle my own scream of horror. My brain rebelled even as a surge of adrenaline prepared my body for a fight. The panther pushed hard against my control and I barely held her back. The shifters would never stand for this, never.
“Oh, thank God,” Val breathed suddenly. Her voice was relieved, which didn’t make sense to me at all. “Tranquilizer.” She slumped slightly against the bar.
Tranquilizer? Tamping down my panic, I focused on the immaculate snow-white fur of Gwendolyn’s belly. I expected a red stain to be growing beneath her by now, but there was no blood at all—only the feathered end of a dart protruding from her pristine coat. Val had been right. There would be no bloodbath, after all. I stepped back into her embrace just as she signaled the bartender for two additional much-needed whiskeys. The crowd was still wild; Gwendolyn hadn’t broken the record, but she had come very close. I watched the dominatrix take her last bow before exiting stage right, while from stage left, the two men dragged the dead weight of the tiger into the wings.
“That was royally fucked up,” Val muttered. When she looked down at me, contrition and guilt warred on her face. “I am so sorry for subjecting you to that.”
“You didn’t.” Only when the words were out of my mouth did I realize just how true they were. I was as responsible for what had happened onstage as Gwendolyn and her anonymous tormenter. I had invited in the animal that now cohabited my body, and she had her own needs, her own agenda. I could still feel her pushing at the boundaries of her prison, instinctively longing to be free in this room that reeked of rage and blood. The atmosphere suited her far better than it did me. Val had been right to question my ability to control my beast tonight. She handed me my second whiskey and I took a long, grateful sip. Maybe the dancing would start up again. The crowd was slowly beginning to settle down, and I imagined that Val would want to walk around, to leave no metaphorical stone unturned. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to maneuver through such a dense pack of people, but I also didn’t see an alternative. Regardless, until the house lights came back up, she didn’t have a chance of finding him.
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“Ladies and gentlemen,” crooned the voice. “I do hope you’ve kept your raffle tickets. The main event is about to commence.”
Val and I exchanged a look. The main event? Whatever she saw in my face galvanized her, and she drained the last of her glass. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
I shook my head. “I’m staying.” When Val glared at me, I lost my temper. “Stop being so patronizing, Valentine! I’m not some helpless flower of femininity who’s going to fall apart at the seams, here.”
The passion drained from her face, frustration turning to contrition.
“You’re right,” was all she said before turning to hail the bartender again. God, I hated making her feel bad. But I also wasn’t going to put up with her Sir Lancelot routine.
The stage was still empty, and I wondered whether our emcee would ever show himself. All around us, vampires were holding on to their raffle tickets as though each was the Holy Grail. Val hadn’t looked at hers, so I moved in until our thighs were brushing and stuck two fingers into her pocket. She shivered. I looked away from my hand and up into her dark, apologetic eyes, allowing my touch to smooth over the tense moment.
I dug out her ticket. “Three-oh-four. Maybe you’ll get luck—”
“Look.”
The two men were back, this time parading in a gaunt naked male twentysomething who couldn’t seem to walk in a straight line. He was either drunk or high—the manacles on his hands didn’t seem to faze him, and he smiled at the crowd, swaying on his feet while the stage crew secured him to the post just as they had Gwendolyn. He would have been handsome if he’d had a little more meat on his bones. I frowned, trying to figure out the name of this particular game. He was human—I had no doubt of that.
“This is Craig,” said the voice, slicing through the crowd’s buzzing murmur. “We found Craig on the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street and Eighth Avenue lying in a pool of his own urine, with one dollar and seventy-eight cents in his pocket. He was in withdrawal when we found him but, as you can see, he’s buzzing quite nicely now!” The crowd roared in approval.
Dread pierced me, cold darkness slowly chilling my blood. Craig was clearly one of New York’s many homeless. If he disappeared, no
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one would miss him. Now I understood why the vampires were the only ones holding tickets.
“Who will have the honor of the first taste?” mused the voice.
“Could it be…could it be number two-hundred and seventy?”
A high-pitched scream of exultation echoed throughout the room as a thin, blonde vampire ascended to the stage, waving her ticket. It was checked by one of the black-coated men, who then allowed her to approach Craig. She smiled. He blinked at her in a mixture of confusion and lust.
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.
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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
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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.
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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 h
as 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.”
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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.”
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