I reach back for Mara, ready to turn her face into my chest, but she isn’t looking at the dead. There’s no flinch in her, nothing. Her chin lifts and her nostrils flare and her head tilts, her and her lion working the room for a scent buried under all the blood. I can’t smell what she’s smelling.
Josiah is already crossing the room. He steps over a body without a glance down and reaches Layla and drags two fingers slow along her bare arm.
“Beautiful Layla.” He sets his mouth against her shoulder. “Did you get any answers?”
She shrugs, and the motion jerks the man higher. “No. They don’t know anything.” She tips her head against Josiah’s mouth. “Too bad it won’t save them.”
He kisses the curve of her arm. The man hanging off her grip claws at her fingers and tears red lines down the backs of them, his heels pedaling at nothing. She doesn’t seem to feel any of it.
“I’m still hungry,” she says.
Josiah slides his hand to the back of her neck. “Then feed, my love.”
She smiles at him, slow and sweet, the blood still dark on her mouth, and the hair on my arms lifts. She lowers the man until the tips of his shoes scrape the floor and he’s level with her, and his eyes go wide.
“I never take innocence.” She says it bored, her thumb pressed hard beneath his ear. “Their blood is sour.” Her head cocks to the side. “Can’t tell if that’s my conscience or if I’ve just got a taste for the wicked.”
Josiah works his mouth along her arm. “The wicked is sweeter. So much sweeter.”
She giggles. The man tries to speak and only a wet rasp comes out, her grip crushing the rest of it off. She hisses in his face, fangs bared, then hauls him in, tilts his head with a press of her thumb, and bites down into his neck. He screams, and she laughs into the wound.
I watch her drink him. She draws him closer by inches, her arm sliding around his back to pull him into her body. Her throat works in long pulls while his fight bleeds out of him. His hands drop off her fingers to hang twitching, then go still. Josiah stands at her side through all of it, one hand stroking her arm, his eyes fixed on her face. He presses soft kisses to her shoulder between her swallows. He watches her feed the way I watch Mara across a crowded room, and the devotion in it is real, and that’s the part that turns my stomach.
Mara’s fist closes in the back of my shirt. I turn slightly for a moment and I cover her hand with mine. “It’s okay, baby.”
She isn’t looking at me. Nothing in her face has moved. She’s still scenting, her chin up and her nose working the air. She’s hunting for Eric, and I’d stake my life on it. I step over a body, my power crackling low at my fingers. “Did you at least get some info before you started slaughtering?”
Layla opens her fist. The body drops and folds against the floor, and she looks over at me with the blood running off her chin. “Whoops.”
Mara hisses, and the sound pulls my head back around to her. I catch myself grinning. My lioness, hackles up over the vampire flirting and not the corpse cooling at her feet.
Layla drags her tongue across her lip. “They wouldn’t talk.”
Josiah pats her backside. “No need to explain yourself, love. You did an amazing job.” She leans up into his hand, and he looks at me over the top of her head. “She did what was necessary.”
I sweep the room, the bodies, the bloodied floor, the man she just emptied. “This was necessary, how?”
Josiah pulls a folded handkerchief out of his jacket and dabs his own face first, slow, working the blood out of the creases of his chin. Then he turns to Layla and cleans hers, drawing the cloth across her lips, her chin, her cheek. She shuts her eyes and leans into every pass of it.
“I’m sending Henry a message,” he says.
I look around the room, and that’s when the sirens reach me, climbing somewhere outside, the wail bouncing between the buildings. Josiah doesn’t so much as glance toward the sound. He keeps cleaning his mate’s face, his thumb steadying her chin.
“Good help is hard to find these days.” His eyes stay on Layla’s. He folds the handkerchief and tucks it back into his jacket. “Nearly impossible.” His mouth curves. “But... when you lose good help...”
A portal tears open across the room, and Eric steps through first. Henry comes through on his heels. I can recognize his features from the hologram. But it’s Eric I can’t pull my eyes off. The white hair and the thin papery skin is gone, and he’s young now, the lines smoothed out of him, his hair gone dark again, exactly the way he looked in the one good memory I have of him from when I was small enough to want him.
My heart drops out of my chest. It happened. He got dark magic.
Henry’s gaze travels the carnage, the bodies, the blood up the walls, and his face folds heavy with disappointment. The sirens climb. We don’t have long. I don’t care about Henry, not yet. I’ll deal with him later. It’s Eric I need, and I need to know how much dark magic is in his veins now.
“Some of my most loyal men,” Henry says it quiet, looking down at his dead. “Do you know how long it took me to earn this kind of loyalty?”
Josiah and Layla cut a glance at each other, twin grins, then turn them both on me. “See,” they say together.
I look back at Mara. “Baby. I need you to stay right where you are. You understand me?”
She nods, and Eric’s eyes slide to her, his smile spreading. “Ah. You brought your pretty lioness.” He sinks his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “I bet you learned better than to leave her alone, after last time.” A low laugh rolls out of him. “I’m surprised she’s still breathing. I was hoping Calyx and Brixton took care of her for me.”
