Chapter 2
“Thanks,” I tell him once I can breathe again. I’ve seen plenty of viscera and gore in my day, but wooden clock through the chest cavity is a new one.
Deacon glares at the still-twitching body. “Didn’t do it for you.”
’Course he didn’t. Deacon had instructed his crew not to tell anybody I was here, and his bartender went around his back to try to be inducted into the Brood. A one-way ticket to a projectile through the heart, apparently.
Deacon clicks on the bedside lamp and takes in the state of the room. Feathers everywhere. Downed curtains. Obliterated bathroom door. “Did you guys fuck first or something?”
I stand from the floor, fighting the urge to dry heave. “That is the most—”
“Save it,” he drawls, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.
I press my lips together. I don’t know what else I expected from the same man who, within the first fifteen minutes of meeting me, tried to solicit oral sex from me and then gave me a black eye. “Where is Reid?”
“Not at the docks.”
My heart stops in my chest. “Does that mean he’s…”
“I don’t think so.”
No relief comes. “Where is he, then?”
He weighs my question. Even with his rippling shoulder muscles and striking shock-white hair, the demon looks drained. “Being tortured, probably. He went against his own. Death is a mercy for an offense like that.”
It’s as gut-wrenching an answer as any he could have given, and he’s said it like he’s telling me the weather. I swallow twice to keep from retching.
“Your school sent the cavalry,” Deacon continues. “I narrowly avoided half the Citadel’s hunters.”
Shit. I’d texted Fiona when Penny and I were fleeing the shipping crate. Told her the High Thane was at the docks and that the Brood had Reid. Of course she’d sent Harker’s best alums from the Citadel. “I didn’t—”
“Send me into a trap?”
Deacon’s gaze is unflinching. Raw, savage power roils in those pale blue eyes.
An evil like I’ve never seen in all my years of hunting.
It crawls over my skin like beetles. Despite everything in me that wants to be strong, I look away, willing my heart to slow.
I know he can hear its thudding. “I swear I didn’t.
All I want is to save your brother’s life. ”
When I find the courage to meet his eyes again, that brutal intensity has been replaced with something vaguely nauseous. Like my feelings for his brother are rancid.
“So if they didn’t…kill him, where would the High Thane take him?”
Deacon stands from the bed. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
This man runs the epicenter of deviant and criminal activity in the city. No way he doesn’t know where Finn would take a captive. “I don’t believe you.”
When his jaw tenses, I swallow thickly. “Now, what does that mean?”
“You know where he is. Or at least have an educated guess. What’s our next move?”
Deacon’s full lips curve viciously. “There is no our, Vivienne. There is only me, locating my brother, and you, staying put until I figure out what to do with you.”
Panic seeps into my blood. “What? I’m not staying here. I have to find Reid.”
“And I have to find a way to neutralize that thing in your back without killing you myself.” When my eyes widen, Deacon only shrugs. “It’s nothing personal. I can’t let a ticking time bomb traipse around Astera unsupervised.”
Coming from someone who isn’t remotely interested in other people or what happens to them? Bullshit. “Why would you care?”
He tsks at me. “Vivienne, I have no interest in seeing bedlam let loose across the city.”
“Don’t you?”
“What kind of business am I going to do in the apocalypse?”
My skin tightens with frustration. “So what, you’re going to keep me hostage here until you find a way to kill me without killing me?”
His grin is crooked and chillingly cold. “Pretty much.”
If I wasn’t so scared of him, I’d tackle the bigfoot-size dickwad to the ground and beat him senseless.
I’ve already sat idly by while one person I cared about died.
I’m not about to do it again. My eyes sweep over the room.
No door besides the one Deacon came in. But that window… All that snow piled high beneath it.
When his eyes narrow, they’re rife with primal interest.
“Let me help you find Reid.” I stand my ground despite the fear snaking around my heart. “Then you can do whatever you want with me.”
“Now you’re just trying to get me hot.”
“I’m serious. You need me to track him down.”
Deacon’s face splits into a violent grin as he chuckles. “Aren’t you hilarious?”
But I can’t give up. Not on my only chance to find Reid alive.
And I have nobody else to align with—I’m a danger to everyone I’d care enough to go to for help, and Harker was compromised by Driscoll…
The thought of letting Deacon walk out of here without agreeing to work with me is almost as painful as that vampire’s fingernails in my scar.
“You think I’m dying to work with a man who betrayed his own brother?
But Reid needs help and we are the only two—”
“Is that what he told you?”
I could pull my hair out. “That you murdered the woman he loved? Yeah, it is. Are you going to deny it?”
Deacon weighs this. “No.”
I want to scream at him. How dare he be so glib over his own barbaric actions? But fighting with Deacon isn’t going to get me anywhere but a body bag. Now is not the time for my aeon rage.
I force out a calming breath. “Listen. You and I have the same goal. I don’t want to be used to destroy Astera any more than you want me to be. And I will do whatever it takes to save Reid. Am I wrong to assume you care about finding him too?”
He may be a menace and a thug, but Deacon dropped everything to go to the docks last night. Weeks ago, he let Reid and me leave Fever Dream alive even after I’d attacked him. He may not want to care about his brother, but he does. I know he does.
Before he can answer, Ward walks through the door. With his dark skin, warm olive eyes, and strong yet never severe features—unlike Baz’s gloom and Deacon’s menace—Ward is about as affable-looking as a celeb at a press junket. He takes in the ruined bedroom and bloody carnage. “She do all that?”
Deacon gives him a look like, Who, this little thing?, which makes me see red. “Our newest recruit hoped Finn would reward him for returning the Brood’s lost host.” Deacon shakes his head playfully. “The greed in some people.”
“Shameful,” Ward chuckles, lifting a bloodied feather from the bed.
Both of them, sickos. I’ve entered ethical opposite land. Nobody here is salvageable. “What about a trade?”
Ward takes me in. “You look rough.”
“I’m fine.”
“Shower?” Ward offers, with a suggestive lift of his brow.
“Did you hear me?” I ask Deacon, ignoring his werewolf. “What about a trade?”
But Ward is persistent. “For real. Do you need more blood?”
It’s so unexpected, my mouth actually hangs open. Is he trying to be…helpful?
Deacon sighs like we are both trying his patience. “Vivienne’s had plenty.”
“Hello? What about offering Finn a trade? His father needs me to open the Chasm. Do what your bartender was going to do, but ask for Reid instead of admittance to the Brood. We don’t have to make good on it.”
“You’d use yourself as bait?” Deacon snarls the words like I’m pathetic. “For Reid?”
“If giving myself up to the High Thane wouldn’t end in the destruction of the world as we know it, I’d do it without asking you to help me.”
Deacon looks unimpressed. “Well, spare us all your big romantic gesture. I didn’t kill my own bartender before he could deliver you to Finn only to tell him myself that we have you.
He finds out you’re here, and his entire Brood shows up at my club and threatens my people.
And even if you offered him or his dad the deal alone, he’d never make good on his end of the bargain.
He knows as well as you do he has the upper hand: You’re a dead man walking.
He’s got his Brood crawling the city for you as we speak.
It’ll be days before he tracks you down.
Weeks, tops. However he got to you last time, he’ll get to you again. ”
I bite my cheek so hard I taste blood. He’s right and I know it.
To the High Thane and his son, I’m still just the aeon Driscoll found at Harker, the daughter of an old classmate of his.
They don’t have my name—meaning my family is safe—but they’ve seen Penny.
They knew she was my roommate in Babylon.
I still don’t know how Driscoll found out anything about my life outside of Harker—how he knew that Penny meant the world to me, and that I’d come running if she was in need—but it doesn’t matter now.
She won’t be safe for long. If Finn wants to get to me, he knows how.
“And let’s say, since you are so insistent on leaving my club, you were somehow to evade capture,” Deacon continues, cocking his head. The intricate tattoos on either side of his neck flex with the motion. “That thing in your back will drain you in three months. Maybe four.”
Horror seeps through me. Drain me how? As if in answer, my scar pulses until I wince.
Deacon studies my features as if I’ve proved his point perfectly. “Which is why you aren’t going anywhere.”
I know better than to beg the White Stag for my freedom.
I’ll only piss him off, risk bodily harm, and be chained in a dungeon somewhere deep beneath the bowels of this club until I’m drained—whatever the hell that means.
And if the horrifically risky escape plot that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for the last ten minutes is somehow a success and I get out of this room in one piece, a countdown will begin until Finn finds me and delivers me to his father.
I need to use my time with Deacon and Ward wisely.
“If you know Finn as well as you claim, why can’t you find out what he’s doing with Reid?
Offer to bend the knee to his father or whatever for information.
Or pay him. You’re rich.” I gesture vaguely at the elaborate, albeit partially destroyed, guest bedroom and the massive nightclub beneath our feet.
Ward shakes his head like I’ve said the worst possible combination of words, and I realize perhaps I’ve taken my nerve a step too far.
“Vivienne.” Deacon isn’t flashing his cruel, Cheshire cat grin any longer. “You’ve seen what becomes of those who disrespect me.” He gestures at the bartender’s crumpled body, his blood still leaking into the floorboards. When I cut my eyes away he steps closer. “No. Look at him.”
Out of fear and the knowledge that the last time we fought he decimated me, and knowing I have no weapons to defend myself should it happen again, I do as I’m told and stare at the vampire with the gory wound where his heart should be.
“Do not ever suggest again that I should humble myself to that fucking buffoon of a High Thane or his moron kid. I wouldn’t help either of them out of a pit of starving rats—not for riches, not for anything.
” He glowers down at me, and despite myself my hands begin to shake.
“You, Vivienne, are as ignorant as you are nearly dead, and you have become very uninteresting to me.”
When he and Ward turn for the door, my heart slams in my chest. “Wait,” I stammer. “At least give me back my blades.”
Deacon’s full lips twist. “Maybe you’ve lost your mind already—”
“You know I can’t beat you.” It physically hurts to admit that out loud, but I push onward.
“Not even with my daggers. But one of your own men nearly killed me tonight. If you’re going to keep me locked away in this room, at least give me something to protect myself with.
Or do you want the full power of the syrabraxa in the hands of anyone who tries to trade me in and winds up taking my life instead? ”
Deacon turns to Ward, who only shrugs. “It’s not a terrible point.”
“No,” Deacon muses, studying me with curiosity.
“It’s not.” When he pulls something from the back pocket of his baggy, dark jeans I flinch.
But in his enormous hand are both of my daggers.
Angel and Hellion. Glittering silver, lying on his flesh.
The only thing that can kill a demon. Deacon’s skin is already burning from the touch of the alloy alone.
I take them quickly, careful to avoid any contact with him. The blades leave a slight singe on his palm. “That doesn’t hurt?”
His glower is nearly as incendiary. “What can I say? I’m good with pain.”
I suck in a bracing, steadying breath. It’s now or never. “Me too.”
And then I hurtle toward the glass window and launch myself clean through it.