by S. M. Reine
“This is going to be great for the polls,” Lucifer said, standing back from the others. A vampire lord was better than his instincts. He wouldn’t join the frenzy. But that was easy for him; he had been snacking on Niamh, which meant he wasn’t starving as badly as his followers. “If this doesn’t close the gap, nothing will.”
“Great,” Deirdre said.
It didn’t sound like her voice at all.
Through the clustered bodies of the vampires, Deirdre saw the witch guard’s eyes sliding closed.
II
The early hours of morning brought velvety silence upon New York’s streets.
By that time, Deirdre was already home—at least, what currently passed for home at Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise—accompanied by a dozen satiated vampires and coolers filled with blood bags.
There would be a party to celebrate the night’s victory. They loved parties, those vampires. They loved to crawl under clouds of lethe and vibrating bass to forget how badly they were starving. They loved to share blood while clinging to one another, bodies twisted with rapture.
They loved to pretend they weren’t dead.
Normally, Deirdre helped entertain them. It was good for their alliance. It was what Stark would have done.
With the dead witch’s eyes in her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to linger.
She went upstairs.
Just a couple of months earlier, Deirdre had been invited to Everton Stark’s room at the asylum for the first time. She had been surprised to find that he’d lived in the same squalor that the rest of the pack did—the same kind of tiny, water-stained, concrete box that his Omega had slept in.
At the time, Deirdre had attributed his choice of living environment to a sense of equality with the people who obeyed him. Psychopathic or not, she had believed that Stark was truly a man of the people.
Now she knew that it had nothing to do with equality.
She knew so many more things than she used to.
Deirdre had followed Stark’s lead when choosing one of Chadwick Hawfinch’s apartments for herself. It was as sparse as those that the vampires occupied throughout the rest of the building, and positioned directly above the lobby celebration. The floor was thin. She could hear them carousing in the way that only vampires flush with blood would.
At other times, the vampires would be quiet, sullen, low-energy, and miserable. Always on the brink of starvation, never capable of dying because they had already passed on from the lives they used to know. But tonight, they had fresh blood. Some of them had even sipped it from the veins of the guard before she died. A rare pleasure.
They were happy.
Deirdre could hear their happiness below her as she bolted the door to her apartment.
When she flicked on the bedside lamp, cockroaches scattered.
She’d been itchy ever since taking that apartment. Deirdre wasn’t sure if it was something she imagined because of the cockroach infestation or if there were bedbugs. She healed lesions too quickly to tell if she were really being chewed upon.
Chances were good she imagined the itchy sensations.
She wasn’t imagining the constant skittering of insect legs within the walls or the drip-drip-drip of leaking rain.
The mattress whined as she sat. The brown stains on the exposed, flattened pillow top could have been perceived as coffee spills if she’d been feeling optimistic. She hadn’t even kicked off her boots before climbing up. What was one more stain among a thousand others?
Deirdre clamped the intake bracelet on her wrist.
The bite of metal teeth didn’t hurt anymore. The sting must have been followed by healing fever, but she didn’t feel that either.
Vampires thudded downstairs while she took a cube of lethe from a wooden box on her bedside table. The faint glow of blue turned her latte-brown skin a sickly gray. When she rolled the cube between the pad of her forefinger and thumb, the lethe within swirled silvery-slick, like oil on the surface of the ocean tossed by a hurricane.
A sound that wasn’t celebration caught her ear. She nudged the broken blinds up an inch, peering down at the street through a crack between the boards nailed on the other side.
Movement swirled over the dark street, punctuated by the flashlights on cell phones, some lighters, a flashlight or two. Some kind of citizen patrol. Wouldn’t be long before that front of the storm smashed into an OPA patrol and turned into violence.
Didn’t matter to Deirdre. The election was coming. There’d be a new Alpha by the time the sun rose again twice, and there’d be nothing worth rioting over anymore.
That was the theory, anyway.
She let the blinds fall back into place. Closed her fist around the cube of lethe.
Someone screamed downstairs.
Probably Niamh.
The vampires laughed.
They’d been enjoying the harpy as their toy ever since Stark left them. Taking turns drinking her blood. Sharing it by the milliliter.
And Deirdre let them.
Gage wouldn’t have let them, but he wasn’t there. She’d killed him. He’d forced her to do it. And then Stark had left too, and Deirdre was alone.
She sank against the headboard, shutting her eyes.
Gods, she hurt all over. It wasn’t even cold in her apartment, not like it was outside—she’d found a couple of space heaters and kept them on high all the time—but Deirdre felt miserable.
She slipped the cube into the intake bracelet. The drug heated in her veins.
The emptiness didn’t leave, but it numbed. It didn’t hurt as much. It was a veil between her and the high-rise, the vampires six feet deep, the sense that she was becoming Stark breath by breath.
Yeah. Deirdre knew a lot of new things about Stark these days.
Too many things.
Election day arrived without fanfare.
Midnight found Deirdre and Geoff near the polling station in Chelsea. She’d posted teams of her allies around the city, stretching them as thin as she dared, trying to provide protection against the attacks to come.
And there would definitely be attacks.
Deirdre watched the election unfold through the scope of a sniper rifle.
The sun crawled overhead, shadows tracked between the buildings, and people streamed through the elementary school. They entered the auditorium through the street and exited on the playground.
While people were inside the polling station, she couldn’t see what was happening, but she could imagine it easily.
The gaean voters would write their names on the log at the entry table. Volunteers would give them a sticker proudly declaring “I Voted for the Alpha!” Then the voters would enter curtained booths, touch the name of the faction they supported, and leave with the pride of having performed their civic duty.
Hopefully they’d get home safely after that. Hopefully there wouldn’t be more riots catching people on their way back to their jobs, lives, and families.
Deirdre didn’t put much stock in hope. That was why she had the sniper rifle.
But the morning of the election was quiet. She was tense at midnight, remaining watchful through the dawn hours. After a little while, watching the voters through the scope got tedious.
Nothing happened.
There were fewer voters during the daytime hours. Many gaeans had normal jobs at that time, and the vampires couldn’t venture outside without getting burned.
Nobody broke into fights. A few loud arguments on the street? Sure. But no blows were exchanged. The riots didn’t resurge on the surrounding block, and there wasn’t a single glimmer of sidhe magic, unseelie or otherwise.
It was surprisingly boring.
When the sun started to dip below the horizon again, Deirdre exchanged positions with Geoff, one of the few surviving asylum shifters. She had picked him to back her up in Chelsea because he seemed unlikely to stab her in the back.
So far, so good.
Once he took the sniper rifle, she tried to rest. She should have s
lept, but she couldn't let her guard down to close her eyes. Instead, she watched the exit polls on a news website.
“The race is currently too close to call,” January Lazar said, voice piped from a speaker on the back of the tablet. She was looking even more carefully groomed than usual. This was a historic day, and the nation’s most ambitious reporter of preternatural politics intended to go down in history looking perfect. “The unseelie faction is making strides in polls along the West Coast, but has yet to close the twenty-point gap between them and the independent faction, led by Everton Stark.”
“Melchior,” Deirdre murmured, letting the tablet fall facedown on her stomach.
He was supposed to be the representative of the unseelie, but he hadn’t participated in the last few days of campaigning. Yet, like Stark, Melchior had people on his behalf working to promote his agenda—specifically, Pierce and Jaycee Hardwick. They were a photogenic couple. The gossip blogs loved them. And they had been working Iowa hard, making visits to Florida, and even kissing a baby or two. The poor babies.
The unseelie were doing pretty well in the polls without an actual Alpha to lead them. They would have done even better if Melchior had shown up on the campaign trail himself.
Too bad a dead man couldn’t campaign.
No matter how hard Deirdre and Rhiannon fought for their factions, Rylie was still leading in the polls. She had a six-point lead over Stark.
It was disgusting to think that after everything she had done to people, after all the pain Rylie had caused, people were still voting for the incumbent.
Why? Because she had the best name recognition? Because the idea of a changed government was frightening? Because people were complacent sheep who just wanted to be led by the wolf they knew best?
Deirdre wanted to believe that it couldn’t be that bad. No precincts were reporting yet, so there were no hard numbers.
This early in the day, anyone could win.
She hoped that didn’t mean that the gaean people were going to lose.
Midnight approached. Deirdre and Geoff swapped positions a few more times, alternating between napping and watching the elementary school.
Once the night grew black enough, most gaeans disappeared. Someone turned off the lights in the gymnasium and vampires emerged to take their turns voting. It made it impossible to monitor activity inside the school. But there didn’t seem to be a need. Everything was quiet.
“Come on,” Geoff muttered under his breath. “Someone needs to give me an excuse to shoot them.”
“Down, boy.” Deirdre was stretched out on the catwalk under a rooftop billboard advertising Synth-O-Neg pods for the Behexed—fake blood in a flavor meant to be universally appealing. Her boot dangled over the side. There was nothing between her kicking foot and the street two dozen stories down.
Geoff eased back from the rifle. “I was hyped up for today to be a disaster. What a buzzkill.” He made a face at Deirdre. “Aren’t you worried about falling?”
“Nope.” She rolled onto her side so that she could see him through the catwalk’s latticed metal. Beyond the edge of the building, she could see vampire voters moving around the street. There was a lone news crew—not January Lazar’s—interviewing people under red light to keep from offending their nocturnal eyes. “Are you?”
“Hell yeah I am,” Geoff said. “That’s why I’m standing on the roof like a sane person while you’re up there doing your best Batman impression.”
“More like Daredevil,” Deirdre said. “I’m not rich enough to be Batman.”
He scoffed. “Marvel. You’re sick.”
Joking about comic books took Deirdre uncomfortably close to thoughts about Niamh, who would be waiting back at the high rise to receive Lucifer’s voters.
Deirdre pushed the harpy out of her mind.
“This calm is almost worse than having fights to shoot at,” Geoff said. “It makes me think that the unseelie aren’t taking the election seriously. If they thought that this presented a threat to them, there would be magic dropping left and right.” He mimed bombs falling from the sky with his hands, making dramatic whistling and exploding noises.
Deirdre wanted to believe it was because the participants in the election had some integrity, but she knew that Geoff was right.
If Rhiannon wasn’t attacking, then it was because she didn’t need to attack.
She swung down from the catwalk. Deirdre landed on the roof beside Geoff.
“It should be fine. There’s no way to subvert the oath that’s binding the Alphas together. As soon as midnight hits…” She checked her watch. It was later than she’d realized. “In about fifteen minutes, all the voting booths are going to relay the votes to the witch who organized this. The magical tally will be instantaneous. There’s no way to get it wrong, defraud it, or duck the responsibility of winning.”
“Sure, that’s what they say on the news, but do you really trust them?” Geoff asked.
Deirdre didn’t need to trust them. She knew the all-powerful witch who had designed the spell—Marion Garin, a terrifying fourteen year old girl who was half-angel—and Deirdre had no doubt that it would work exactly the way it was supposed to.
But her unpleasantly close personal relationship with Marion, the Office of Preternatural Affairs, and all things Rylie Gresham wasn’t common knowledge among Stark’s people. She didn’t plan on allowing that to change any time soon. Her authority was tenuous enough without Stark’s presence.
If they found out that she was a traitor, she’d be ripped apart by vampires.
Deirdre and Geoff spent the remaining moments in uncomfortable silence. She kept turning the tablet on and then off again. She couldn’t bear the tension of watching reporters predict the election’s outcome.
She didn’t have to be watching the news when midnight hit.
Cries drifted above the city. They started a few blocks away and rippled through the nearby buildings.
Deirdre had expected the building storm of rage to end once the election ended. Instead, it felt like it was reaching a new fever pitch. The screaming—she hadn’t heard anything like it in weeks.
“What the hell?” Geoff asked.
Deirdre went for the tablet. Geoff got there first. He picked it up, hit the power button, and propped it against the wall where both of them could see.
They caught January Lazar’s statement mid-sentence.
“—close of polls, the unseelie have won the election,” January said. “The results are indisputable. The new Alpha for all North American gaeans will come from the unseelie faction.”
III
Deirdre didn’t need to summon Stark’s people back to the high-rise. They were already waiting for her there when she returned, converging from the shadows of night.
The vampires beat her there, anyway. There was no sign of the shifters yet. Once night fell, few things moved faster than vampires.
Walking into the high-rise’s lobby to face a sea of bloodless faces made Deirdre stop dead in her tracks.
Lucifer stood in front of them all, arms folded.
An admonishment hung on Deirdre’s lips. She wanted to scorn them for failing to stay outside, where they could have been doing crowd control. They should have been trying to stop the riots. They should have been saving lives.
“You said we’d win,” Lucifer said. “Stark was going to put us into power.”
Deirdre didn’t dare watch the vampires surrounding her, even though they were stepping forward to enclose her in a circle. She couldn’t make herself look weak in front of them, even if there was no reason to be afraid. They were vampires, dry and dusty, and she was a phoenix, a creature of flame.
She was stronger than them. All of them.
That was the theory, anyway.
In reality, she couldn’t summon her flames and the vampires had numbers on their side.
She wasn’t confident Gianna and the shifters would back her up if the murder attacked.
Deirdre put on h
er most authoritative voice. “We didn’t have reason to think that Stark would lose, much less that he would lose to the unseelie. Nobody has even seen Melchior for days.”
“Nobody has seen Stark in days, either.” Lucifer didn’t have to make the accusation outright. Deirdre knew what he was asking. It was the same thing that the packs had been asking ever since Deirdre took over Stark’s affairs in his absence.
Where is Everton Stark?
“Stark’s got better things to do than deal with you.” Deirdre was getting good at the steely voice and dead eyes, inviting Lucifer to challenge her authority. She’d sure been using that attitude enough recently to try to keep the vampires in line.
It didn’t seem to be working anymore.
Lucifer stepped up to her, almost close enough to bump chests. His red eyes glimmered with murder. “I made a deal with Stark because I thought he could give us what we need. I’m not feeling very confident in his abilities now.”
“You don’t have to be confident. You just have to obey.”
“Why? So that we can let him hand our people over to Melchior and Rhiannon?”
The vampires were closing in around them. It was strange how their bodies radiated no heat. That many vampires should have made the lobby feel stuffy, but Deirdre couldn’t feel them at all.
When the vampires moved, Deirdre could hear a faint slithering sound, like leather dragged over desert sand. It was the dry, raspy way the husks of their dead bodies moved. Slow, but not sluggish. They moved like predators as much as the shifters did, though it was far less animal and distinctly more alien.
Gianna and her wolves appeared at the edge of the lobby. It gave her no confidence. Deirdre didn’t trust them to have her back if the vampires attacked.
They didn’t look happy about the election’s outcome, either.
“This isn’t over until it’s over,” Deirdre said, letting her gaze sweep over the vampires, resting briefly on Gianna’s shifters, before moving back to Lucifer. She imagined herself a dictator speaking from the pulpit. She tried to radiate cool confidence. “Melchior hasn’t taken Rylie Gresham’s job yet. The magic isn’t in place. Those bastards cheated to close a twenty-point gap, and I’m going to find out how.”