They can smell me. Taste me.
And they come, helpless to resist.
I open my arms, and my power arcs again—out, out, snapping through the dark with jaws, biting into flesh, into bone, into magic and marrow. The curse works through me, but not against me. It doesn’t take from me. It takesforme.
Silken power slides through my veins, weight and warmth filling every empty corner inside me.
They come faster now, drawn in by hunger, by instinct, by the scent of death wrapped in sugar.
Some try to kill me. Some try to kiss me. All of them fail.
Their bodies wither beneath the weight of my need. Their souls pour from them in shimmering ribbons, pulled into the hungry maw of my curse until there’s nothing left.
I walk forward, the air parting for me, the last of the vampires breaking against my power.
I’ve waited my whole life to stop hiding. To stop starving. And I’ll feed on this entire fucking world before I let them keep him from me.
The chamberwhere they are holding Talon isn’t what I expected.
It’s worse.
Stone walls press close, slick with mildew and shadow. Candles flicker in old iron sconces. The air is wet and metallic, soaked with the scent of blood and damp rot. A table at one end gleams with steel instruments and broken glass beakers, each of them sticky with drying crimson. Magic residue clings to the surfaces with a static that makes my skin crawl.
And in the corner…
Bodies.
Some slumped in chains. Some crumpled in heaps, lifeless and used up. Then I recognize one of them. The level one mage who created smoke ribbons in the club to impress a girl the other night. Though now, his sightless eyes stare up at the ceiling. He’s sunken, bloodless.
Then I recognize another one. She had been floating quarters at the bar. Now her head is twisted at an odd angle, dried blood at the puncture marks on her neck. Were all these people mages?
My stomach turns.
I scan the bleak surroundings until my gaze lands on Talon.
He’s been strapped to a vertical stone slab—arms bound wide with iron cuffs, legs locked at the ankles, chest exposed. His head hangs forward, chin resting on his chest, his body limp beneath the pull of gravity.
He jerks, just slightly, as if trying to lift his head.
Clinging to him, a small, dark-haired parasite of a woman.
Mal.
She’s latched to the front of him, her fangs buried deep in the crook of his neck. Her fingers claw into his waist, bare feet braced on his thighs like she climbed him, climbed my Dragon, and is nowfeedingfrom him like he’s a fucking wine fountain.
His blood trickles from the corner of her mouth, glistening red-black. Her eyes flutter half-closed in ecstasy.
She’sgorgingon him.
I start to gather my hunger before I remind myself what happened last time. I grab her by the hair and yank her off Talon. She crashes into the table, glass shattering, liquids colliding with sizzles and smoke leaving an acrid stench in the air.
I stand between her and Talon.
Mal lifts her head, licking her lips as she rises to her feet with a slow, languid grace. Her small frame makes the gesture look almost childlike.
“You came,” she murmurs, her voice soft and infuriatingly mild. “I had a feeling you would.”
Black scales form on her skin, creeping like armor up her neck from the collar of her dress. Fissures glow orange beneath the surface, pulsing with light, as if something volcanic writhes beneath her fragile form. Sparks spit from her fingertips—mage magic, stolen and unstable.
