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I can tell Solon isn’t his usual collected self either. His step is more of a saunter than a stride, he looks relaxed and loose, his eyes bright and shining.
We walk back out into the party and Wolf is there to greet us.
Solon drops my hand and goes to slap Wolf on the back.
“Nice try,” he says with a hearty laugh, and Wolf gives him an innocent look in return. “I know what you were trying to do, golden boy.”
I’m smiling at them, feeling this warm and protective instinct toward them both, when a sulfurous smell fills my nose.
You’re the one, a sinister voice says inside my head.
I whirl around just in time to see a flash of teeth as they clamp down on my neck, my blood spilling to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-One
It takes half a second before the pain sets in, the agony of sharp foreign fangs tearing into my skin, realizing that someone, not Solon, is biting me, drinking my blood.
I scream.
The band stops playing.
The vampire sucks back my blood and then unhooks his jaw from my neck, and he’s stumbling backward a few feet with a look of awe and anger and my blood on his face, staring at me.
“It is her!” the vampire announces to the crowd. “It is the daughter of Jeremias! I have tasted her blood, I know!”
I stare at him numbly, my hand at my neck, trying to stop the bleeding. Wolf is already at my side, holding onto me, and Solon goes straight for the rogue vampire, slower than normal because of the dreamy state we’re both in, but he gets there all the same.
Solon reaches out and grabs the vampire by the throat, lifting him off the ground, squeezing so hard that I think he might decapitate him that way. It takes everything in him to regain control of himself, his rage indescribable. Everyone in the nightclub has stopped, panic on their faces, unsure what Solon’s rage might unleash.
“Who. Are. You?” Solon ekes out his words, each of them landing like the sharpest knives. “Who are you?”
I guess the vampire is as unfamiliar to Solon as he is to me. He’s got a buzzcut and black eyes, skin deathly pale, my blood running down his chin. Solon is breathing in deep and I know the smell of my blood on someone else is making him crazy.
I think back to what I saw, the monster inside Solon, the beast who ran wild with madness for hundreds of years, and suddenly I’m afraid. Not for myself, but that this might put Solon back, tip him over an edge he can’t come back from.
Wolf’s arm goes around me, holding me to his chest, trying to comfort me, perhaps picking up on my thoughts, but I can’t stop watching the scene unfold.
“Who are you?” Solon repeats again, his voice echoing through the room.
The vampire smiles in response, bloody teeth. “Yanik sent me,” he whispers raggedly, his voice ruined by Solon’s grip. “He told me we’d find the truth. The truth you’ve kept hidden from all of us. Surely you’ve had her blood, Absolon. Even you don’t have that much restraint.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Solon says. “But if she’s the daughter of Jeremias, then that’s what she is.”
But he’s lying. Solon’s lying!
He did drink my blood. A lot of it.
Far more than this guy had.
He knows the truth about me too, he knows I’m the daughter of Jeremias, whatever the fuck that even means.
Why didn’t he tell me?
“And now you must die for what you’ve done,” Solon says, his voice
turning to steel, his eyes flashing with vengeance. “You took the blood of another vampire. That’s not allowed in this club, in this house, in this city. You will pay for this with your life.”
A hush goes over the crowd, everyone taking a step back. I grab hold of the lapels on Wolf’s tuxedo, holding tight.
