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He grabbed my face to keep me from looking at the blood. “Where are you?”
I screamed back, but only because it felt like I was being ripped open from the inside.
“The Or-Orph-pheum. ” I was beginning to shiver, my teeth chattering. “Lucas?” I looked at him with pink tears streaming down my face as I fought to breathe. “I’m so sorry. I want to be here. ”
“You will be. ”
“I’m dying. ”
And then he was gone and I was alone in a widening pool of my blood. Pain shot through the whole of my being, and I knew I wasn’t dreaming anymore.
“She’s coming to,” Marcus said.
I felt fingers withdraw and realized they had just been inside my body. A pitiful, keening noise echoed in the air. It too had just been inside me.
Red fog slipped from my eyes, leaving me looking at a low ceiling in a poorly lit room. Everything came back in tiny shards. The Orpheum, the guards, Marcus and the gun.
Another agonized sob escaped my throat. On instinct I scrambled for a weapon, but my hands were empty and when I tried to move them they were heavier than anchors. I could barely lift them from the floor. My rib cage was punctured, just as it had been in the dream. I didn’t need to see the hole to know it was there; it felt like someone was shredding me open from the inside. There should be more wounds from the spray of the buckshot, but I could only feel the one. I tried to take a deep breath but was left sputtering. Only the left side of my chest rose when I tried, and there was a build up of pressure on the right side that made it feel like my body was caving in on itself. I whimpered, but even that hurt.
Marcus came into view, still nude, standing over me with an expression of triumph on his face.
“You bleed slowly. You’ve been out for hours. ”
In all that time he couldn’t find a robe?
Something else sunk in. Hours? “N-night?” Saying the one word felt worse than any torture I’d ever endured. My throat was raw, and though every breath I took seared through me like a blitzkrieg, I couldn’t stop my labored panting.
“Oh she is clever, even as she dies,” someone else spoke up. This voice was more familiar than Marcus’s and sent a chill through my body and turned my bones to ice. No. Not this. “Her blood does smell delicious, doesn’t it?”
“No. ” I could
n’t even breathe without wanting to black out, but still I tried to sit up. Dots of white light swam across my vision, and I was forced back down by a wave of nausea. Every inch of me thrummed and reverberated with the swell of hot, liquid pain, the way a thumb pulses after being struck by a hammer. “No. ”
“She’s quite adamant, non? Apparently it is not night. Shall I return to my rest, then?” The vampire was laughing as if the whole situation was the funniest he had ever encountered. His face came into view over me.
I blinked several times to be sure it was really Peyton. He had not aged at all in six years, which was to be expected, but there was something different about him all the same. His hair was a dull rust color and fell in waves around his face. He peered down at me with soft brown eyes that reflected the laughter of his voice. When Peyton had been turned he’d probably only been sixteen or seventeen years old. He had the face of a boy on the verge of becoming a man and forever caught in between.
He was lovely, with a youthful roundness to his features. The paleness of his skin against the coppery hair made him look angelic. It was his smile that made the angel fall from grace and gave away the devil inside.
He stepped over me, placing one foot on either side of my legs, and crouched low, not kneeling so as to avoid getting my blood on his pants.
“Secret, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Not. ” My lips quivered, and I tried a few times to take a deep breath to finish the sentence. “Long. ” A new sensation rolled over my body, replacing my torment with a cold nothingness. “Enough. ”
“Haha!” He gave me an assessing once-over. “I am pleased Marcus and his queen abstained from finishing you off until nightfall. ” He caressed my injured side, and I cried out again. “Very pleased. ”
Peyton had always been a fan of playing with his food. It was one of the things that got him in serious trouble with the council before he’d gone rogue. His idea of play was more in line with the Marquis de Sade than sports and rec. Funny, but even on the verge of bleeding to death on a concrete floor, I still wasn’t in the mood to be penetrated by a sadist. Especially not when I had a gaping chest wound waiting for him to explore.
“I was interested to know how you came to be here in the daytime, my little dhampyr. But Marcus’s queen was able to provide me some enlightening insights. ” His gaze was crawling over my body. “It seems the queen knows quite a lot about you, Miss McQueen. ” When he looked at me, the malice in his eyes glittered like the joy of a child. Then he glanced to the side and fixated on someone else. “Isn’t that right, Ms. McQueen?”
While he spoke I had begun to drift, the fog of unconsciousness settling over me again, trying to protect me from the impossible hurt of being awake. I barely had time to be confused by his change of titles before someone jabbed a thumb deep inside the bullet wound on my side. I wailed, much to Peyton’s obvious delight, but the sound was dismantled by my ravaged throat and lungs and came out as a stuttering whistle. When I looked at the queen to whom he’d addressed with my own name, I couldn’t have hidden my shock if I’d been totally uninjured.
Kneeling next to me, as naked as her mate Marcus, was a beautiful woman about forty years old, with hair as curly as my own. Only hers was the dark brown color inherited from my grandfather. Her father.
“Mom?” She looked older than she had in the pictures I’d seen, and far less jovial. I looked from her cold face to the finger she had pressed knuckle-deep into my flesh, her nail scraping against my rib bone. “Mom. ” Then I began to scream again.
Chapter Thirty-Four
