Would everything change once we did this? How could it not? But there was no going back. I couldn’t back out, because then when Tristan still went with her, I’d resent him for it. We’d fight about, and it would never go away, no matter how much I wanted it to disappear.
The house lights came up, startling me. The show was over, and now I had no control over what happened. Terror paralyzed me. I was the most powerful female vampire in the city, and some Vulture threatened to bring me to my knees. Tristan held out his hand to me and I stared at it, not sure what he wanted me to do.
“Come on, beautiful.” He smiled at me, but looked puzzled. Was he too amped from the crowd to be able to pick up on how I felt, or did he just not care? “It’s time for the next show.”
I nodded and slid down off the road case, smoothing out my skirt before taking his hand. The last thing I needed to do was go approach this girl with the back of my skirt caught up around my waist.
Tristan rubbed his thumb against the back of my hand. I concentrated on its soothing rhythm. My feet dragged behind me as we headed to the holding room. Fans swooned and gasped as Tristan entered. Their energy prickled my skin, making me feel alive again. Making me forget for a minute what I was about to do.
Until I spotted Tony talking to a voluptuous girl with a tiny waist cinched by a corset. Her tight skirt only covered her behind, and the lines on her fishnet stockings led my eyes down to her sky high heels. As my eyes traveled up the back of her body, I saw the black pigtails. Honey.
Tristan led me right over to the two of them. The room swirled around me like a kaleidoscope. Tony looked at me apologetically. He knew something. Honey kissed Tristan on the cheek but she never took her eyes off of me. Tristan murmured something in her ear. I didn’t need to hear it to know what he was saying. Her eyes lit up and a smile spread over her face.
Honey moved to me, taking my hand in hers. Nothing about it was formal, which somehow made it better. We couldn’t start this with a handshake. She leaned close to me, the tops of her breasts brushing against me. “I’ve been hoping you’d do this, Callie.”
I swallowed hard, smiled stiffly, and nodded. Tristan put his arm around me and we headed out of the room, with Honey on the other side of him, talking about the show, and whatever else. Normal.
Yeah, right.
I looked at the girls standing in little bunches, watching the three of us walk away, with their mouths open. For once, I wasn’t the object of their envy.
And that’s exactly what bothered me.
“Where are we headed?” I forced the words out.
Honey shrugged, like she did this every day. For all I knew, she probably did.
“Anywhere you want to go,” Tristan said.
“We need to go someplace without, you know, cameras.” I looked down at my feet, unimpressive in my cloth shoes. “That’s the last thing we need.”
“The only place that leaves is my bedroom.”
Honey’s smile was just that. Smooth and sweet. “After you.”
Tristan had to be kidding. He wanted to bring this girl into our bedroom and have sex with her in the bed I slept with him in every night?
This was the worst idea either of us had ever had. I wanted to kick myself for being curious about any of this in the first place. Why did Tristan need this? There was nothing about this girl that felt scared or desperate. She was willing. Too willing. The only person showing any fear was me.
We didn’t stop in the living room, why bother, the procession moved straight to the bedroom. I wanted to pull Tristan back and make the whole thing stop. But what if they laughed and went on without me? What would I do?
There was no getting out of this.
No one bothered to turn on the light in the bedroom. We really didn’t need it, the lights from the strip pulsed against the windows, illuminating us all in an unflattering neon glow. Tristan let go of my hand and stretched, his shirt riding up on his stomach. Honey sat down on the bed. I just stood there, not knowing what to do.
Tristan sat down on the bed beside Honey. I wanted to run away, to try to scrub the image out of my brain. But running would make this worse. Thank God I didn’t need to breathe, because I couldn’t.
Honey ran her hand down Tristan’s arm, over to his back. He leaned in to kiss her quickly, and I thought about jumping out the window, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of this spectacle. They broke away from each other, and Honey looked at me and smiled.
Tristan held his arm out towards me, but I didn’t move right away. I took his hand like it was something I’d never seen before, touching it tentatively. Closing his fingers over mine, he pulled me into his lap and started to kiss me so deeply that if his hands didn’t hold me on his thighs I would have fallen to the floor. I pulled him closer to me by his hair, hoping he would melt into my skin and we’d fade into another dimension. He moaned against my lips, and I moved further into his lap, straddling him.
Another set of hands caressed my back, dragging me back into reality. I pulled away from Tristan’s lips and looked at Honey, startled.
“I want to play, too,” she purred, leaning up on her knees and kissing my cheek. I looked back to Tristan, not sure what to do. His eyes glowed gold in the dark room. His hands worked against my arms and he just smiled before he leaned over to kiss Honey, taking his hands off of me and pulling her in by her shoulders.
I watched Tristan kiss this girl I’d barely spoken to while I sat in his lap. It was surreal, like watching one of my dreams I couldn’t wake up from. I knew what was going on but nothing was quite right. She giggled, swatting him away like a girl playing spin the bottle. Still laughing, she grabbed me by my arm and I fell into her like a rag doll.
She tipped my face up, her fingertips under my jaw. She leaned in close, smelling strongly like vanilla liquor, and pressed her lips against mine. She moved them to kiss me, and as Tristan leaned in on my other side and nuzzled my neck, I opened my mouth to sigh and accepted her kiss.
It felt strange, her soft little tongue probing my mouth like she was just as unsure about all of this as I was. I let her in, relaxing against her lips as her hands rested against my chest.
Tristan’s hands had worked their way down to my skirt, pushing it down past my knees. Honey pulled my shirt up over my head as if they planned it. I put my hands over my body, still sitting in Tristan’s lap in just my bra and thong.
I shied against Tristan’s body, as if it would cover me. He kissed my collarbone as he unhooked my bra. I gasped and pushed against him, writhing against his lap. He moaned and turned away from me to kiss Honey.
I scrambled out of his lap, heartbroken that my rubbing against him in nothing but a thin strip of fabric couldn’t distract him from our guest. I covered my chest with my arm and sat with my feet in a tangle, watching him lay down against Honey’s body, unhooking her corset in slow motion. As her massive breasts escaped from captivity, his mouth covered them. She gasped and sighed as he nipped and bit. He pulled her fishnets down one leg then the other.
At least I wasn’t the only one naked now.
Honey sat up, not the least bit ashamed of her body, and helped Tristan peel off his leather pants. This girl was everything I wasn’t. Half-heartedly, I pulled the pants away from his ankles. He sat back on his knees as Honey lay in front of him, one leg on either side of his body. I didn’t know where to look.
Tristan pulled me in close to him, kissing me and running his hands up and down the length of my sides, settling on my breasts. “I’m going to take her, but you’re going to bite her while I’m doing her.”
My jaw fell open against his shoulder, and I nodded into his hair. I pulled away from him so we could go to work. Honey held her arm out to me as I crawled up to the head of the bed. She smiled at me as I got closer. I knew she wanted me to kiss her again. Tristan put his hands on her waist, and pulled her in closer to him, entering her. I froze, watching them buck against each other, first in slow motion, then building to a furious rhy
thm.
Jealousy burned and pulsed under my skin, an ocean storm threatening to swallow all three of us. I couldn’t stop my lip from peeling away from my teeth, exposing my fangs along with the rest of me. And I didn’t want to. Honey squeezed her eyes shut as cried out with every thrust.
She never saw me coming.
Honey shuddered when my teeth broke through her skin. Her hips jumped upward, still full of Tristan, and he fell down on top of her, his hand reaching down and caressing my shoulder. I sucked her blood as hard as I could. She cried out, but I ignored her. I drank down her passion, her confidence, and then finally the fear and desperation. That’s what pushed me to the top of my high, a strange ecstasy. Dominance. Her heart pounded in rhythm with her emotions, speeding up and then starting to lose hope. The fainter the beat became, the more electricity flowed into my veins.
“Beautiful, that’s enough.” Tristan’s hand now pulled at my shoulder, I hadn’t even noticed until then that he’d stopped fucking her. My eyes, as red as the blood that flowed from Honey’s neck wasted on the sheets, met his. I smiled against her skin, then went back to work.
“Callie. Stop!” Tristan needed both hands to try to pry me away from her. I pushed him to the end of the bed without letting go of her. Honey gasped for air, her last breaths, then her body stilled.
I sat back, putting my hand over my mouth, and stared down at her lifeless body. Tristan scrambled back up to the head of the bed, putting his fingers over her neck and looking back and forth from me to her.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
It was a lie.
“I knew you’d do that.” Tristan looked down at Honey sadly.
“And you still let me do it?”
“I want you to embrace what you are.” He acknowledged my shock. “You’re clinging to being human, and it’s holding you back.” His hand brushed against my cheek, and I shied away from his touch.
I killed someone, and I didn’t feel the least big sorry. I felt numb, and a little inconvenienced. But satisfied. Sated. Stronger. In this world, it was how I protected what was mine. Tristan was right, I needed to do this.
“What do we do?” I looked over at Honey’s lifeless body. “With her.”
Tristan kissed me, dragging his lips over Honey’s blood that had dried on my chin. “We call someone and they’ll take her away. And then it’s over.”
Just like that.
“You sound like a pro.”
He nodded. “Occupational hazard.”
Remorse crept in. “She seemed like a nice girl. We shouldn’t have done this.”
“She was a great girl. And you’re right.”
“And everyone saw us leave with her. What’s going to happen to us?” I started to panic.
“Nothing.” Tristan smiled sadly. “They can’t touch us.”
I rocked back on my heels, hugging my bare chest. I didn’t know what affected me more: Honey’s death or my get out of jail free card. How good I felt. How much I wanted Tristan at that moment.
Tristan looked surprised as I crawled over to him, careful not to touch Honey even though all I wore was her blood. My finger traced along his collarbone, down his breast bone, following the hollow of his abdominal muscles, trailing into the hair below his belly button.
He caught my hand and brought me close to his body, sinking his teeth into my neck before I even landed back on the bed. I pushed him back and we fell on the floor. Since Honey lay in the middle of the bed, I was glad to be off of it. Tristan had flipped me onto my back, still drinking my blood, Honey’s blood, from my veins. It didn’t take him long to become aroused again, and I screamed as he came inside me.
This was the first night I truly embraced what I was.
A monster.
I didn’t tell anyone about this meeting with Cash, except for Tony, only because he was my ride to Circus Circus. It was about time I realized I didn’t have any peers, and their concerns couldn’t be my concerns. The less people clouding my mind and bravado, the better.
Leaders operated alone.
“So what is it about Blade that’s so special?” I asked Cash. I felt combative and I wanted to bounce of the walls in his cell of a house. “This fire thing. Explain it to me.”
“It’s not so easy.” Cash had a lot of Tristan-like qualities about him. The more excitable I became, the calmer and more amused he was. “Vampires shouldn’t be able to do what he does. He’s considered a pyromancer, or in more recent terms, a pyrokinetic. The fire seems to be responding to his energy. I can manipulate fire as part of my act, but I can’t touch it. He shouldn’t be able to, either.”
I stopped, digging my fingers into the thickness of the chair upholstery. Blade was just a vampire. He was strong like one, he lusted for blood. He swore he was just like me. But he wasn’t like me at all.
“How is he doing it?”
“There are two theories.” Cash explained, running his hands up and down his thighs. Did this subject unsettle him? I hoped so. I didn’t want to feel so alone when it came to trying to understand Blade. “He may either be able to absorb the fire into his body, or he’s repelling it. Like two magnets.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Great, another vampire with no answers. Did any of them know anything? “Those are complete opposite explanations.”
“I didn’t say they both applied to him. Just one of them,” Cash laughed, and then shook his long hair out from behind him. “You’re feisty today, aren’t you?”
“Shouldn’t I be?” I was so sick of not being taken seriously. He pissed me off with his laughter. “He’s spreading my sex tape all over creation—“
“I saw.” A sly smile spread over his face.
I had to stop and catch my breath. Everyone had seen video. I might as well have been standing there naked in front of him, it would be less than he’d already seen. This was something I had to get used to. And overcome.
“I want revenge,” I said quietly, looking down at the Oriental rug at my feet. Pushing a curl away that had escaped my braid, I looked back up at him. “Can you blame me?”
Once again his laughter prickled against my skin. “Not at all. I like it, actually. But you’ve changed since the last time I saw you. There’s something more primal about you.”
“Is there?” Shit. I knew there was. Everything about me felt different since that night with Honey.
“My little Mistress is all grown up. I can see it in your eyes. You killed someone,” he smirked.
“Yeah.”
“How did it feel?”
Like I killed homeschooled Callie from the Vineyard. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “It felt good.” I smiled, hoping he’d drop it but knowing better. ”But this isn’t about me.”
“Fine, be coy. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Cash continued to look amused.
Inside my head, I felt a rub, like one of those long cotton ended probes a doctor would use to swab your throat. Cash was inside my mind. I hadn’t realized it was possible to feel more naked.
“Stop that,” I snapped.
“Stop what?”
“This isn’t about the sex tape!” I lost my cool and yelled.
“No shit. You hunted someone down like prey and sucked the life out of them.” He held his hand up to stop me from talking. “It’s something you needed to do to come in to your own. This is why I admire your creator. He doesn’t apologize for what he needs. I’m proud of you. Own it, Mistress.”
“How can you be proud of that?”
“It’s what we do!” He raised his voice to match mine. “When are you going to understand that?”
“I understand it now, alright?” If he tried to scare me, it didn’t work. “But I’m not proud.”
“Skulking around in the shadows, acting inferior to humans is what is wrong with our kind!” Cash was no longer amused. “This is what makes us weak. Don’t feed into that. You can’t go back to what you were.”
“Tell me about it,” I exhaled.
Cash rose and approached me, tipping my face up to his. I bristled at this liberty. “This isn’t the first time your mouth has gotten you into trouble.”
I refused to meet his eyes. “Have you been talking to my mother?”
He laughed heartily, his hand resting on my shoulder as if he needed balance. “Mistress, your reputation precedes you.”
“Well, I’m looking to change my reputation, and I want to start with Blade.” I pursed my lips together. “What will take him down?”
“A strong leader.” Cash paced near the bookshelf.
“So you do it.” I crossed my arms.
Cash shook his head. “You have to be the one.”
“So you’re chicken shit,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes. “Great.”
Cash laughed again. “I can be accused of a lot of things, but being a chicken shit isn’t one of them.”
“What do you suggest I do, you know, leader to leader? Because I’ve got nothing. And I don’t owe you anything, either, for this. I’m doing this for me.”
“Is that so?” He raised an eyebrow. “That’s the only reason you should do this.”
He was pissing me off more every second. “Stop evading my question and tell me what I need to do.”
Cash enjoyed my irritation a little too much. “You need to get in his mind, and control the emotion that he uses to work the fire. There’s no telling which one it is, no two vampires are alike, but I’d be willing to bet it’s anger.”
That made sense. Blade hated Talis, and in anger burned her to death. And now, he hated me, so anger would be an easy emotion for me to evoke in him.
But if I got close enough to touch the flames in his mind, could I survive?
“I didn’t know we could manipulate thoughts.” Every day I spent as a vampire I felt stupider. Was that what he was just trying to do, inside my head? I hated the possibility. “I thought we could just feel the emotions. We can control them?”
“It takes practice.” Cash sat back down. I had yet to sit since I’d entered the room. I couldn’t afford to get comfortable around this vampire. I’d been screwed over enough already by the rest of them, and Cash was more--dangerous.
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