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His lips were chapped and cracked, and dry blood—his own—had turned his chin into a gross canvas of gray and blackened red. His once penny-bright hair was crusty and looked crisp enough to crumble if I were to touch it. I had no desire to touch it. I didn’t plan on stepping any closer.
He smiled, an unfortunate gesture that caused his already broken lips to split further. I grimaced. His gums had shrunk and pulled back, making his teeth look longer and more animal than ever before. His single fang—the other had been permanently lost in a fight with me—was yellowed like that of an ancient skull.
Peyton shifted, his bones grinding against each other. The padding between his joints must have been worn down to dust. He was, in effect, the living dead, and not in the way most vampires were. He was a walking, talking corpse.
That realization was all it took for the remnants of fear clinging to me to fall away. He was pathetic, and I didn’t fear the pathetic.
“I see they’ve been keeping you comfortable.”
“I see…” There was a rattle in his voice, his throat too dry and raspy to make more than a few words at a time. “I see…you…are much…changed.”
The Tribunal mantle came with a big level up in vampire power. Vamps could sense each other’s levels as easily as humans could register age by looking at someone. In that sense, I had some pretty impressive power wrinkles since I was now the big, bad boss.
“So it seems.”
“Tell me…cherie…do you…think of me…often?” The wicked glint in his solid-black eyes was unnerving, but I did my best not to slip backwards into my fear.
“I try not to think of inconsequential things anymore,” I lied.
“Do you…know…what I will…do? When…I am free?”
I rocked back on my heels, my calves aching from being kept in a low squat to stare at him. “What? Go to the salon? You’re in dire need of some deep conditioning.” I sniffed dramatically. “And a bath.”
He smiled, and a clear liquid oozed from the cracks in his lips that he made no attempt to lick away. “I will…make you…pay.”
Any warmth I’d begun to feel was gone. The glittery blue light felt cold, and in spite of the open door behind me and Sig so close, I felt alone and uneasy. Peyton couldn’t hurt me, and he would never be free. But something in the promise of his words made me frightened of him in spite of how illogical it was.
That’s the beauty of fear, it does not yield to reason.
“You’ve tried to kill me twice before.” Lowering closer to the ground, I braced my palms against the floor and inched my way towards him, looking much more like a wolf in that moment than the vampire I was meant to be. “You failed. You will fail again. But let’s be clear, here, Peyton…you will never get out of here. Not while I’m still living.”
He tried to grin at this, but moving his mouth so much in such a short time must have been uncomfortable. His lips were stuck against his teeth, letting me see his one yellowed fang. I grinned back so he got a good long look at my own fangs, both white and untouched. When I was close enough, I placed my hands on his cheeks and pulled his face towards mine. Peyton struggled and gnashed at me, but for once I knew he was no match for me physically.
“I will…”
I snarled when he took a pause, and the glint in his eyes faded. “You will do nothing. You’ll fester and rot here. Starving until you are just a bag of dry skin holding a pile of bones. You’ll never drink from anyone again.” I dropped one hand and cupped his face with the other, squeezing until his mouth was forced open. The stare I gave him then was loaded with threats. “Maybe I should neuter you now.”
His tooth was dry and coated with a layer of what felt like dust. I didn’t want to think about what it really was when I gave the elongated canine a wiggle. “Looking a little long in the tooth,” I teased, my voice bitter. He tried to clamp his jaws shut and bite me in the process, but the grip I had on his chin made it impossible. My fingers tensed on the fang.
“That’s enough,” Sig interrupted. His presence in the room caused the blue glow to shrink back into the darker recesses. Was there anything he couldn’t scare? “Secret, visiting hours are over now. You can come back and play with Monsieur Peyton some other time.” The French pronunciation spoken with Sig’s Scandinavian inflection sounded alien but somehow more beautiful.
I couldn’t let go. I’d never had the upper hand with Peyton before and I wasn’t willing to give it up on command.
“Secret,” Sig warned. He didn’t need to say more than my name. I understood the implication loud and clear. I couldn’t kill Peyton, and I couldn’t enact any kind of punishment on him without the express permission of my fellow Tribunal leaders. Sig might let me, knowing my history with the Cajun maniac, but Juan Carlos would point out that Peyton’s punishment was already worse than death.
Maybe he was right.
I released Peyton’s chin, and he wiggled his jaw.
“I hope you like it here,” I told him. “Because you’re never, ever getting out.”
“We…will…see.”
When I passed Sig on the way out of the hovel, I didn’t miss the fearsome look he fixed on Peyton. Sig would make sure Peyton never got out, I felt certain of that. As much as Sig often terrified me, he was a just leader, and it mattered to him whether I lived or died. This was one evil he could protect me from.
Outside, with the door closed behind us, I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had begun brewing since we’d first arrived. “Why would you bring me here?”
“I thought it would be good for you to see him like this.”
