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“Yeah, but without really seeing you, they’ll just presume you’re one of the thralls entertaining a client. Now they’ll know otherwise.” He glanced at Azriel. “Hope your friend has come prepared to fight, because if things get nasty—and I suspect they will, given the wait we have for the feeding rooms—I won’t be able to control it. Not with the size crowd we have.”
I stared at him for a moment, then said, with a touch of exasperation in my voice, “You can cut the act. I know the council intends to test me.”
“They want you tested, yes,” he spat back. “But I’m not entirely sure they want a bloodbath in this facility—which is exactly what they might get by introducing fresh meat and inciting trouble at this hour of the evening.”
Dread rolled through me. “Fresh meat?”
He gave me a look that hovered between annoyance and concern. “We’re talking junkies here, remember? For most of them, any female in this club who isn’t a vampire has two purposes—to feed from or to provide sexual service. The thralls do the latter, the blood whores the former.”
And if this did all end up in a bloody fight, it would just make the whole situation worse. Fresh-flowing blood and hungry vampires were never a good mix. “Will you step in if things get bad?”
The look he gave me was answer enough. He’d been ordered not to.
“This way,” he all but growled, and turned, leading the way into the main room.
The doors closed silently behind us, and the darkness felt thicker, more oppressive, than before. I walked down the steps, my gaze sweeping the room, searching for the many vampires I could smell but not see. The stench of their hunger sharpened as we moved through them, until it seemed so thick that I could reach out and touch it. Fresh meat indeed.
I reached back and drew Amaya. She flared to life at my touch, her blade shadowed but dripping lilac rain across the floor. This time, her hissing was audible rather than just in my head. She was giving the nearby vamps a verbal warning not to come close—even though that’s exactly what she wanted. Her hunger and excitement ran like electricity through my mind, and I knew if I concentrated hard enough I’d understand exactly what she was saying—as I had when I’d been the Raziq’s prisoner. It might have been only one word, but it had been clear and it had helped me kill one of the bastards.
But I didn’t concentrate. To be honest, I wasn’t really ready to understand the language of my sword, and fear had a whole lot to do with it. I couldn’t escape the notion that understanding her might somehow make me more like her and less like me.
Which might seem silly in the cold light of day, but right now, with darkness and danger all around us and her hunger beating a drum inside my brain, making me itchy to react, it seemed a very real threat.
So I clenched her hilt tight and edged a little closer to Azriel as we trailed Marshall through the darkness. Sullen, hungry faces were briefly illuminated in the fire of Amaya’s brightness, then faded away, but the farther we moved into the room, the thicker and more dangerous the atmosphere became.
Azriel drew Valdis and swept her lightly from left to right. She hit nothing, but her blue fire lifted the darkness even further, and gave the gaunt figures that flirted briefly with the light a surreal glow.
A glow that spoke of hunger and need.
I shivered and hoped like hell the Rakshasa made an early appearance. I wasn’t sure if the swords would keep the vampires at bay once Marshall left us.
They will not, Azriel said, because that is not what the council wish. They aim to test or kill, and they would be happy with either outcome.
Since Hunter doesn’t want me dead, this test makes no sense. My gaze darted sideways as a shadow moved. A vampire bared his fangs at me, madness in his eyes. I raised Amaya and he withdrew, but there was a light in his eyes that suggested it wouldn’t be for long.
As you have noted, Hunter is not the council, even if she is one of the most powerful vampires in its ranks.
So why doesn’t she put that power to use and save me from idiotic situations like this? It doesn’t make sense.
Hunter plays for more than just your life. And remember, she is not constrained by human sensibilities.
But she was human once.
Near-immortality has a way of cleansing the soul of any semblance of humanity. It is rare for anyone—human or otherwise—to live for many centuries without time washing away all that they once were.
That’s not always the case, I said, thinking of Uncle Quinn, who was only a hundred or so years younger than Hunter.
As I said, it is rare.
We continued to walk through the room. By the time we swept into a narrow corridor, sweat beaded my forehead and ran down my spine. I flexed my fingers, but it didn’t do a whole lot to ease the tension thrumming through me. We may have made it out of the main room, but we were far from safe, and the ever-growing tide of hunger that trailed us only confirmed that.
The glow from the swords revealed a dozen doors leading off the corridor. Each one had a light above it, some red, some green. The sounds coming from inside the red-lit ones suggested there was some heavy-duty lovemaking going on—some solo but mostly partnered, if the scents were anything to go by.
And suddenly the reason for all the thralls we’d sensed earlier became obvious—they might have been here to provide sex, but they were also more able to withstand harsh punishment, and healed far faster than regular humans, thanks to their blood link to the vampire who had created them. Which wasn’t saying they couldn’t be killed—they weren’t immortal, just as vamps weren’t immortal—but short of cutting off their heads or gutting their internals, they were capable of surviving events that would have killed them in the pre-thrall era.
Marshall stopped at the second-to-last door on the right and opened it. As he did, the light above went from green to red. “I don’t recommend moving out of here without me.”
“It’s not like we’re going to be any safer inside than outside now, is it?” I commented grimly.
