Aaron
Igrab Mara’s hand and haul her toward the stairs.
The library is coming apart around us. Humans shove past and bolt for the doors, knocking chairs back and leaving their books open on the tables.
Not one of them looks at her. They run right past my mate and their eyes find nothing where she stands.
A lioness is loose in the middle of them, and their bodies don’t even know to be afraid.
I take the stairs two at a time with her at my back, and Josiah is waiting for us at the top of the landing.
“What the hell are you doing?” My voice cracks high out of me and I hate the sound of it.
He rolls one shoulder and drags his thumb across his chin, smearing the blood there instead of wiping it clean. “I’m getting the job done.”
“Are you serious?” I tighten my grip on Mara’s hand and pull her in closer to my side.
He turns and grins at me, his mouth dark with dried blood. “Yes. I’m very serious.”
I groan and shoulder past him, keeping Mara tucked behind me. There’s a set of double doors at the end of the corridor, heavy oak, and something hits them from the inside hard enough to bow the wood on its hinges. Mara flinches into my back, a hiss ripping out of her, her tail snapping straight.
“Baby, please.” I look back at her. “Just do what I ask and stay behind me.”
She presses a finger to her lips. Her tail keeps swaying, but she nods. I lift my palm and let my power build until it hums, then push, and the doors blow off their hinges and slam flat into the walls, plaster cracking where the brass bites in.
Layla is standing in the middle of the room with a man hanging off her fist by his throat, his feet kicking a foot above the floor.
Blood paints her mouth from her bottom lip to her chin.
Bodies are down around her, four, five of them.
Blood sprayed everything like something out of a horror film, and the copper of it hits the back of my throat thick enough to gag on.
Josiah flashes in at my shoulder, and stops to take in the room with a grin slow across his face.
“Isn’t she magnificent?” His voice drops low and goes soft. “My beautiful dark queen.”
I reach back for Mara, ready to turn her face into my chest, but she isn’t looking at the dead. There’s no flinch in her, nothing. Her chin lifts and her nostrils flare and her head tilts, her and her lion working the room for a scent buried under all the blood. I can’t smell what she’s smelling.
Josiah is already crossing the room. He steps over a body without a glance down and reaches Layla and drags two fingers slow along her bare arm.
“Beautiful Layla.” He sets his mouth against her shoulder. “Did you get any answers?”
She shrugs, and the motion jerks the man higher. “No. They don’t know anything.” She tips her head against Josiah’s mouth. “Too bad it won’t save them.”
He kisses the curve of her arm. The man hanging off her grip claws at her fingers and tears red lines down the backs of them, his heels pedaling at nothing. She doesn’t seem to feel any of it.
“I’m still hungry,” she says.
Josiah slides his hand to the back of her neck. “Then feed, my love.”
She smiles at him, slow and sweet, the blood still dark on her mouth, and the hair on my arms lifts. She lowers the man until the tips of his shoes scrape the floor and he’s level with her, and his eyes go wide.
“I never take innocence.” She says it bored, her thumb pressed hard beneath his ear. “Their blood is sour.” Her head cocks to the side. “Can’t tell if that’s my conscience or if I’ve just got a taste for the wicked.”
Josiah works his mouth along her arm. “The wicked is sweeter. So much sweeter.”
She giggles. The man tries to speak and only a wet rasp comes out, her grip crushing the rest of it off. She hisses in his face, fangs bared, then hauls him in, tilts his head with a press of her thumb, and bites down into his neck. He screams, and she laughs into the wound.
I watch her drink him. She draws him closer by inches, her arm sliding around his back to pull him into her body.
Her throat works in long pulls while his fight bleeds out of him.
His hands drop off her fingers to hang twitching, then go still.
Josiah stands at her side through all of it, one hand stroking her arm, his eyes fixed on her face.
He presses soft kisses to her shoulder between her swallows.
He watches her feed the way I watch Mara across a crowded room, and the devotion in it is real, and that’s the part that turns my stomach.
Mara’s fist closes in the back of my shirt. I turn slightly for a moment and I cover her hand with mine. “It’s okay, baby.”
She isn’t looking at me. Nothing in her face has moved. She’s still scenting, her chin up and her nose working the air. She’s hunting for Eric, and I’d stake my life on it. I step over a body, my power crackling low at my fingers. “Did you at least get some info before you started slaughtering?”
Layla opens her fist. The body drops and folds against the floor, and she looks over at me with the blood running off her chin. “Whoops.”
Mara hisses, and the sound pulls my head back around to her. I catch myself grinning. My lioness, hackles up over the vampire flirting and not the corpse cooling at her feet.
Layla drags her tongue across her lip. “They wouldn’t talk.”
Josiah pats her backside. “No need to explain yourself, love. You did an amazing job.” She leans up into his hand, and he looks at me over the top of her head. “She did what was necessary.”
I sweep the room, the bodies, the bloodied floor, the man she just emptied. “This was necessary, how?”
Josiah pulls a folded handkerchief out of his jacket and dabs his own face first, slow, working the blood out of the creases of his chin. Then he turns to Layla and cleans hers, drawing the cloth across her lips, her chin, her cheek. She shuts her eyes and leans into every pass of it.
“I’m sending Henry a message,” he says.
I look around the room, and that’s when the sirens reach me, climbing somewhere outside, the wail bouncing between the buildings. Josiah doesn’t so much as glance toward the sound. He keeps cleaning his mate’s face, his thumb steadying her chin.
“Good help is hard to find these days.” His eyes stay on Layla’s. He folds the handkerchief and tucks it back into his jacket. “Nearly impossible.” His mouth curves. “But... when you lose good help...”
A portal tears open across the room, and Eric steps through first. Henry comes through on his heels.
I can recognize his features from the hologram.
But it’s Eric I can’t pull my eyes off. The white hair and the thin papery skin is gone, and he’s young now, the lines smoothed out of him, his hair gone dark again, exactly the way he looked in the one good memory I have of him from when I was small enough to want him.
My heart drops out of my chest. It happened. He got dark magic.
Henry’s gaze travels the carnage, the bodies, the blood up the walls, and his face folds heavy with disappointment. The sirens climb. We don’t have long. I don’t care about Henry, not yet. I’ll deal with him later. It’s Eric I need, and I need to know how much dark magic is in his veins now.
“Some of my most loyal men,” Henry says it quiet, looking down at his dead. “Do you know how long it took me to earn this kind of loyalty?”
Josiah and Layla cut a glance at each other, twin grins, then turn them both on me. “See,” they say together.
I look back at Mara. “Baby. I need you to stay right where you are. You understand me?”
She nods, and Eric’s eyes slide to her, his smile spreading.
“Ah. You brought your pretty lioness.” He sinks his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels.
“I bet you learned better than to leave her alone, after last time.” A low laugh rolls out of him.
“I’m surprised she’s still breathing. I was hoping Calyx and Brixton took care of her for me. ”
My magic sparks at my fingertips, blue-gold crackling, and I clench my fist and kill the light before Eric can see what his words do to me.
Henry turns his head toward Eric. “We don’t have time for a father-son spat.”
Eric points at me, his eyes never leaving my face. “My son’s a siphoner. Same as Josiah.” His lip curls. “Stronger, probably. Worse.”
Layla hisses, fangs out, blood still rimming them. “Don’t speak to my man that way.”
Josiah turns and runs the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “Oh, beautiful Layla. I love when you stand up for me.” He kisses her, quick and soft, then looks back to me. “Do we spare him, or do we kill him? Your father?”
I don’t answer, and black magic pools in Eric’s palm, oil-dark, the light bending around it instead of catching. He throws both hands out, one aimed at Josiah, one at me, and it erupts off him in a twisting violet-black wave. I turn my back on it and get a shield over Mara just in time.
“Aaron, get out of the way!” she screams.
It catches me across the back. Pain nearly shatters me as the floor rushes up and my knees slam into it.
The spell meant to tear through her breaks against my shield instead, scattering across the bookshelves in dying sparks.
She’s untouched. I drag a breath through the burn.
Across the room, Josiah throws himself in front of Layla, taking it across the shoulders.
“I love you, beautiful Layla,” he grinds out, and she hisses, furious, beating at his back while he folds his body over hers.
Then it’s a war. Eric comes at us with both hands working, dark magic pouring off him in ribbons, and the level of it staggers me.
Dark magic has him fast and brutal, the spells coming quicker than I can counter them.
I throw up a barrier and his first hit shatters it.
I throw up another and it bows, the strain driving a spike straight through my temples.
He’s whipping us and I feel every bit of it, every block rattling down through me.