by Cate Corvin
My stepbrother pulled me away from the wall. “Let Tori have a good time before you screw her,” he said, just audible over the music.
Sura watched with a tight jaw as Will tugged me back into the fray, his fists clenched at his sides.
Before he vanished behind the wall of dancers closing in around me, he raised his hand to his mouth, his black expression becoming a smirk before he sucked the finger he’d had inside me.
My body was humming with the unfulfilled wave of need Sura had started. Will touched his face, then ran his thumb over my lower lip, smearing the pixie dust there.
Just the sensation of his fingers on my face was enough to send a fresh wave of sparks through me, tempered with irritation. “Will, you absolute cock-block.”
He gripped my chin, pulling me closer, and my heart began thumping faster than the music’s bassline. His other hand snaked around my waist. “Tongue out, Tori.”
I stared up at him, the jade of his eyes as clear as the sea, pupils tiny black points, and frowned. He wasn’t moving, focused on me with an almost frightening intensity. Everyone else, even me, was unconsciously moving with the music. “Are you elfstruck, too?” The dust was shimmering on his cheek…
He licked his thumb and within seconds, his pupils had swallowed all that jade. “Duh. All the shots are laced with it.”
Will moved closer, twining around me as the moonspawn began howling again. “Now, tongue.”
“Just a speck, okay?” I opened my mouth, expecting him to grab a pixie from midair or touch his thumb to me.
His own lips and tongue were still shimmering with the pixie dust. Will leaned down, his hands tightening on my waist when he ran his tongue over mine in a slow, sinuous motion.
Even with the constant pulse of the dust, I was frozen in shock. My stepbrother traced my cupid’s bow, and finally drew back. His throat worked as he swallowed.
The dust was diluted, just enough to take the edge off the pounding in my veins. “You were jealous,” I said, my lips tingling when I smiled. It was strangely clear despite my muddled head. “Sura was getting some and you weren’t.”
“What do I have to be jealous of?” He spun me around and I undulated against him, my skin sparking. “Selena’s here, all fucked up on dust, too.”
But Will’s hands were dancing over my hips, like he wanted to grab me and couldn’t bring himself to do it. Selena was nowhere in sight. There was only us, the moonspawn, the vampires. A few other Tenebris students were dancing with Shadowed Worlders.
“Just admit it,” I said breathlessly, reaching up to touch his sparkling cheek. “You’re jelly. But the real question is- grape or strawberry?”
Will bent down closer, his face pressed against my hair. “Which would you rather lick?”
Honestly, any flavor would be fine with me, as long as it was on him.
I opened my mouth to answer, and a tiny bit of clarity popped my bubble. I was flirting with Will. Sura had almost brought me to orgasm in the middle of the club, and I was imagining licking jelly off my dickhead of a stepbrother.
Maybe the pixie dust was finally wearing off. “Neither,” I gasped. “I prefer marmalade.”
I needed water and air, a place to clear my head.
Will almost didn’t let me go, but I tugged my hand out of his and pushed through the fray.
The roof. I needed the roof, high above any of this mess. Halfway up the metal stairs to the seventh floor, I looked back down, and saw Will staring up at me, his jaw set, eyes cold.
I turned my back on him and almost ran the rest of the way up.
The only floor I paused on was the eighth, where I grabbed a cup of water from a trollish bartender, and after two more floors, both of which were blocked off from view of the staircase, I found the rusted emergency exit door to the roof.
It was only midnight, glittering glass buildings rose all around the brownstone, and the night sky was obscured by clouds and smog, but after the relentless crush of the pixie club, it was as peaceful as a Zen temple.
I chugged the water, gasping as the ice froze my throat, but between the cold and the slap of wind against my face, the grip of the pixie dust began to fade.
My body still ached for their touch, worked up until my blood felt like it was going to boil me alive from the inside. What had happened to Operation: Safe Human Dick?
All it took was two dust-laced shots, and I was letting a teammate fingerfuck me on a vampire’s dance floor.
My cheeks burned despite the cool night air. Honestly? I wished Will hadn’t interrupted. I’d have gone back to Libra with Sura without a second thought, sober or elfstruck.
Whatever was so magnetic about him, I needed to figure out how to shut it down.
I strode across the roof, intending to look over the side, but slight movement caught the corner of my eye and I spun, sliding my dagger from its thigh sheath.
What I saw drove the absolute last vestiges of drunkenness from my veins. A small part of me wished I was still high so my mind wouldn’t have to deal with the reality of what was before me.
A body had been chained to the top of the roof, silver chains glinting around their wrists and ankles and keeping them pinned spread-eagle. Whoever it was, they would’ve been unrecognizable, even if I’d known them all my life.
The body belonged to a vampire. Only a vamp could become so much black ash and char, bits of red showing through the shell of their sunburned body.
But their fingers twitched, and the lungs drew in an agonized, rasping breath.
The vamp had to have been chained out in the sun all day to look like that, but they were still alive.
Swallowing hard, tasting bile in the back of my throat, I crept closer.
The vamp was female, the slightest signs of a feminine physique just discernible under the ruins of her body. Her eyelids had been cut off, and an entire day of sun exposure had burned her eyes milky white. Her lips and gums were so dry and shrunken they exposed her fangs to the root.
My stomach flipped with nausea, and my palms were swimming with sweat. She’d been fucking mutilated. There was no coming back from this level of damage, not even if she drained several humans tonight.
For a moment, I forgot how much I hated her kind. She was still suffering, letting out a harrowing groan with every breath.
I gripped the dagger, taking small, shallow breaths. I couldn’t leave her like this, not even if it meant breaking the Clouded Court’s rule of violence against a vampire. I couldn’t leave her to this agony. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t what we stood for.
I knelt next to her, and her lips parted a fraction, another groan filling the air.
Chills ran over my skin when I realized she was saying something, and I leaned in closer.
“Badb,” she rasped, barely louder than a breath. “I see you.”
I had no idea of what to say, or who the fuck Badb was. I gripped the dagger, wondering if I should get up and walk away, leave Clouded Court territory forever and pretend I’d never seen her.
“I’m ready.” She groaned again. “Ready. Please.”
“Okay,” I said, my throat thick. “It’s over. Go with peace.”
Without letting myself think or feel, I plunged the dagger down, driving it straight through her heart until it punched into the back of her ribs.
The burned vampire gasped and went still. She was so far gone it had taken less than a second to snatch away her life.
I didn’t pull the dagger back out until my heart had slowed its hammering in my chest. The thunderous beats were so hard I felt like it might explode right through my skin.
I’d just earned my first black drop tattoo, and it was only because someone had wanted this poor vampire to feel slow, lasting agony before she died. The mark would go on the inside of my right arm. I’d spent years as a child wondering when I’d earn my first drop, but somehow, even though I’d gained other tattoos through kills, it seemed obscene that by putting her out of her misery I’d earned an
accolade.
I stood up on shaky knees and turned around. I needed to get as far from Club Bathory as possible before King Guilloux sensed the death of one of his subjects-
An enormous figure stood in front of the metal access door, and for a wild second, I thought Sura had come up after me.
But the giant was Nordic and pale-skinned, covered in lacerations from head to toe, with nearly every inch of that alabaster skin stained with black bruises. His hair was pale blond under the streaks of blood that covered him.
Eyes like glacial ice cut right through me, but he took one step forward and fell to his knees, his gaze cutting between me, the dagger in my hand, and the body of the dead vampire.
His lips drew back over his fangs, his entire face contorting into a bestial expression. Vampire. Even with the blood and bruises, the pure rage on his face, he was beautiful in a rough, raw way. “You killed her.”
He must’ve been hurt very badly, if he wasn’t coming after me this very second. Right now, while he was still healing, was my only chance to get through him and that door before this became the place that I died.
There was no point in lying. One vamp had seen me and would find the evidence on her body. Guilloux would know shortly that a slayer had killed a vampire on his territory. “She was suffering. I ended it.”
A tendril of fear coiled through me at the look in his eyes. It was merciless, cold, brutal. God, I was so fucked if he healed before I could reach that door.
“Did you take her fangs?”
Confusion lanced alongside the fear. “I- no.” I shifted my stance subtly, ready to block him if he rushed me. “All I did was… help her along. There was nothing else I could do.” I could always jump off the roof and grab for a handhold…
“If you killed her, she died by the blade,” he snarled, sounding more animal than man. “You dishonor her!”
What the fuck? “I’m not the one who mutilated her,” I said, holding out a hand like he was a wild animal that needed to be calmed.
“If you killed her, you must take her fangs.” He got to his feet and stumbled forward several steps. My stomach almost let go when I saw that his left leg was twisted around backwards from the knee down. Who had these poor bastards pissed off? “She deserves that much.”
I’d already condemned myself by murdering a vampire on Court territory, and now he wanted me to dismember her corpse? Hell no.
“I’m not taking part in your barbaric rituals,” I snapped. Luckily for me, he was heading for the dead vampire, skirting me entirely, but as soon as I made the mistake of saying ‘barbaric’ he’d wheeled around again, his leg canted sickeningly.
“You will come and take her fangs before you step foot out of this Court,” the vampire growled. Even thick with pain, his voice was a deep, gravelly bass, hard as iron.
The way to the door was free and clear. I stepped backwards, my fingers aching around the handle of my blade. “No,” I whispered. I’d earned a black drop, and a potential lifetime of looking over my shoulder for Clouded Court emissaries. I was done here.
The vampire met my eyes, and I felt his hate, coiling like a dark, venomous snake as he marked my face in his mind. When he spoke again, the flatness in his tone was far more frightening than his rage. “You’ve dishonored Eluned Ravensbane, you coward. A worm among slayers. Unworthy, bloodless, craven.”
His cold rage was becoming an inferno as he tore me down, naming each one of my perceived sins, but a single detail stuck with me. My first vampire kill was named Eluned Ravensbane. A distant, detached part of me memorized that name and tucked it away like a precious jewel in a box.
“I will not stop until I’ve seen you speared at the end of my sword,” the Viking vampire ranted, and there was a sharp crack as his knee began to heal, his leg twisting around to where it should be.
Maybe I was cowardly, but I wasn’t stupid. I fled.
CHAPTER SIX
________
TORI
“Let’s start today with an exercise in situational awareness. Who can enlighten me on this weekend’s news in the Shadowed World?” Knightley looked out at us expectantly.
I stopped my foot from jittering under the table, but my fingers started drumming on my notebook.
Since I’d murdered Eluned on the roof of Club Bathory, my nerves had been shot. Sura had caught me fleeing the pixie club, but he and Will hadn’t asked what was wrong, just escorted me out of the club, summoned a demon-driven taxi, and walked me back into Libra.
I’d disappeared into my room and hadn’t come out until the class bell had chimed on Monday morning. I’d told James what I’d done, whispered prayers for him to help me, but he was dead and gone. James couldn’t do anything to help me now. I regretted putting Eluned out of her misery, as horrible as her death been.
Nobody had come for me. Headmaster Burns hadn’t summoned me to the office to meet a vampire delegation from the Clouded Court.
For the first time, it was sinking in that I might get away with murder.
“King Jean Guilloux is dead.” Will’s cool, crisp tone cut through Knightley’s silent class.
The professor inclined his head, limping around his desk and turning his dark gaze on Will. How the fuck had my stepbrother known that?
I didn’t look at my stepbrother even though my curiosity was a raging volcano. Instead I kept my gaze firmly fixed on the chalkboard or on Lux, almost every member of which was still bruised and battered.
“And what, besides hearsay, told you that a vampire king had fallen?”
“Club Bathory was open cover this weekend,” Will said lazily, his arm propped on his seat back. He looked every inch an insouciant asshole. “Pixie dust is worth its weight in gold, and they were scattering it by the bucketful. It was a celebration.”
My stomach clenched. I didn’t want to remember the pixie dust or the molten, silky way it made me feel… or Will running his tongue over mine.
Nor did I like knowing I’d fucked up by not staying sober. I should’ve been learning the lay of the vampire court, not getting wasted on vodka and Faerie magic. I owed Apolline a solid punch in the nose; she had to have known what that much dust would do to me, that I could’ve ended up bitten by a vamp.
“And who is the new monarch?” Professor Knightley looked over Lux, but most of them stared silently at the table. Aislin Liddell met his gaze squarely, her jaw set, the socket of one eye the color of a bruised plum.
When nobody answered, he leaned back against his desk and crossed his arms. “Thraustila is now the king of the Clouded Court. I expect few of you know who he is- but you might know his most loyal vassal.”
“Càel, the White Wolf,” Apolline said with a fluttering sigh.
Even I knew that name, though I had very little practical experience with vampires. Càel was a household name among slayers: who bled out in your Wheaties this morning? Someone who pissed off Càel.
“Yes.” Knightley nodded, but there were tiny lines of strain at the corners of his eyes. “The coup happened much sooner than we’d predicted, inevitable though it was. You all have a layman’s understanding of vampire Law; the throne is decided by blood. In this case, Thraustila and his opponent would’ve murdered Jean Guilloux, and dueled to the death themselves.”
Apolline rubbed her temples, still suffering from a two-day bender on Faerie drugs. “Okay. So Thraustila is the king now. Big whoop. Far as I’m concerned, he throws great parties.”
Knightley gave her a tight smile that wasn’t friendly in the slightest. “If you’d been paying attention in class, you would realize how important this development is. The fabric of the Shadowed World- our world- is determined by who lives and dies, but most of all, who rules. In the hours between Guilloux’s death and Thraustila’s coronation, vampire Law was null and void. While you were carelessly enjoying their offerings, Moreau, the Clouded Court was being upended around you. Thraustila murdered one of Càel’s sisters, possibly one of his own daughters, to gain the throne.
The peaceful stability that Jean Guilloux spent decades establishing was shattered in one night.”
My lungs didn’t seem to want to work.
“Thraustila murdered the other contender, Eluned Ravensbane, one of the three knights known as the Morrígna. Without Guilloux’s Laws in place, the White Wolf and his remaining sisters are free to rampage as they see fit.”
No. I had killed Eluned Ravensbane. Thraustila had merely been the one to stake her out on the roof and let her cook in the sun all day.
Black dots danced in front of my eyes. I’d met Càel, the motherfucking White Wolf, right after I’d murdered one of the Morrígna, his beloved sisters.
And he’d sworn to kill me.
“Have they openly murdered any humans yet?” Aislin asked. My stomach was churning so hard, if I opened my mouth to ask any questions, I might throw up.
“No, and therein lies the crux of this situation.” Knightley had sketched out the Clouded Court’s hierarchy on the chalkboard, and now he pointed to several names at the top: Càel and the other two Morrígna, Morgrainne Crowfoot and Rhianwen Moonfawn. “Since the coup and coronation this weekend, we haven’t heard a word about mass human deaths. Yet all evidence is contrary to what we know of this particular family: over the last three thousand years, Càel himself has wiped entire cities off the map, while the Morrígna have never been shy about bleeding their captives in victory, to the degree that they took the name of a war goddess and no one disputed it. Odd that they wouldn’t begin their reign with blood.”
“They’re mourning,” I said, so low I almost didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.
“Pardon, Holmwood?”
I felt every gaze in that classroom like a lead weight on my chest. It took a lot of effort to sound natural. “They’re mourning, Professor. They’ve been a family for thousands of years, and… Thraustila murdered one of them.” I almost tripped. Almost.
But it made sense to me. After James died, I’d been a wreck. It’d taken months to want to go outside again or do anything at all.