Graceful as a cat, I launched myself over the bed and into his immediate space. I grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall, his feet several inches off the ground. He snapped out of his stupor and attempted to put up a fight, but his youthful scrappiness did not avail him, and I disarmed him easily.
He was useless without his stake, offering no more than sputtering moans as I repeatedly pounded my fist into his face.
Bones shattered. Teeth dislodged. Skin tore. Blood glistened.
So. Much. Blood.
In a feeble attempt to block the onslaught, he raised shaky arms. The brand on his inner arm was streaked with blood, shining darkly in the dim room.
That rune…
Something about it tugged at my memory, but I couldn’t quite place the image. Had I seen it before? A book, perhaps? Something of Gray’s?
I grabbed his arm and wrenched it closer for a better look.
Something of Gray’s…
Recognition slammed into me like a fist. Ihadseen it before—the night Gray and I snuck into the morgue. It was an exact match for one of the symbols carved into the flesh of Blackmoon Bay’s murdered witches.
Carved into Gray’s best friend, Sophie.
Gray had only seen a photograph of it, but I’d never forget the sight of her face when she’d looked up at me across that room, pale and shaken. Utterly undone by the evidence of such gruesome torture.
I clenched my teeth, seething.
Jerry and his number two weren’t just a pair of thugs keen on taking out an out-of-town vampire. They were witch hunters. And they knew we were here.
They’d either seen Ronan and Emilio drop me off before dawn, or someone in the motel’s employ was connected to them. However they’d learned about my arrival in Raven’s Cape, these men had come here to execute me in my sleep, assuming I’d be an easy kill.
My vision swam with red.
I slammed my fist into the wall beside his head, punching a crater into the plaster and brick. Unlike his friend Jerry, this guy was still breathing, and he gasped. Barely.
“Please,” he whispered, the broken cry of a broken man who’d already stepped one foot through hell’s gate.
“You don’t deserve to beg, you fucking coward.”
Some part of me—a faraway voice in my head—knew I should keep him alive for questioning. They were witch hunters, and they’d come to kill me. Likely they were connected to Jonathan, and they might’ve had information about Gray’s whereabouts.
But the cool, rational part of me that had kept things running smoothly for decades was no more than a dim voice of protest, trapped behind a wall of red-hot rage.
I let out a roar, my unfiltered anger mixing with the scent of his adrenaline-spiked blood to ignite something feral inside me—something I’d kept chained up for far too long.
It was against Council law for me to take an unwilling victim. Against human law for me to kill him.
But for the first time in many, many years, I no longer cared about protocol. My body, which had learned over the decades to be satisfied with the chilled donor blood procured from medical establishments with poor security, suddenly vibrated with a deep, ancient need.
I was…thirsty.
I bent my head to his neck and opened my mouth. The room dimmed around me, all other concerns vanishing. There were only two things now that mattered: my rapidly-elongating fangs and his pulsing vein, begging to be pierced.
I bit into his flesh, enjoyed his gasp of shock.
I drank deeply. Desperately.
Warm, wet liquid filled my mouth, coating my throat. There was an angry, bitter tang to it, like wine that had long ago turned, but I didn’t stop. Not even when my head spun and my skin buzzed with too much, too soon, too… everything.
Not even when I felt the last of his life force fade away.
