27. Lycan
Lycan
“You’re sure she’ll come?” someone asked, drawing me from my stupor.
I opened my eyes and rolled my head back on my shoulders, trying to focus on the scene.
My blood burned, every molecule on fire from the silver injections.
Then they’d taken turns beating me to a pulp, biting into my neck and drinking my blood like fucking leeches.
I was surprised they weren’t passed out in some drug-induced coma by now.
Two male vampires stood on either side of a tall blond woman, her hair cut in a bob, angled toward her chin.
They wore filthy jeans and leather cuts that proclaimed them as members of the Bloody Scorpions MC.
She had on a black power suit with matching heels, her ostentatious jewelry glinting in the low fluorescent light.
She looked the part of the powerful vampire queen in charge, but something about her energy smelled off.
Sure, she reeked of decay and rot like the rest of them, but her skin had grown paler since the royal reception, black veins protruding beneath her flesh like snakes or worms. Either would be appropriate.
“She’ll come,” Evelyn said. “The pack will come. We have three of their brothers. They won’t be able to resist.”
“This one’s awake,” said a bloodsucker from somewhere behind me.
Evelyn turned in my direction, and I almost laughed at the haunted glimmer in her eyes. They’d once been crimson and furious, the mark of a powerful vampire. Now she looked like someone had snuffed out her soul.
“Lycan, good of you to join us again,” she said, taking a step forward. “I take it your little silver nap was refreshing?”
“I’d say it’s good to see you, Evelyn,” I groaned. “But you look like shit.”
She hummed and stared down at me like a bug she yearned to squash.
“Too much time spent stalking me and not enough being a murderous monster?” I choked out a laugh, spitting up blood that dribbled down my chin.
The vampire closest to me slammed his fist against my cheek, whipping my head to the side. I bit my cheek and spat on the floor, smothering another laugh.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I taunted. “Did you want that? I know how you demons like guzzling the shit. Like fucking ticks.”
“That’s the thing about you shifters.” Evelyn tilted her head to the side. “Such arrogance. Such hypocrisy. I know how you transition, with all the rutting and the blood sharing. I know how you mate, how you savagely tear into your lover’s neck and combine your magic. You call me the monster?”
“And yet, you’re the one taking hostages,” I sputtered, blinking back another wave of nausea.
She winced, not from my words but from something invisible inside her, something that seemed to twist in her gut and writhe beneath her veins.
“So what’s the plan? Hmm? Draw my pack here? Kill my mate in front of me?” I scoffed. “Predictable.”
“Mate?” She straightened with an indignant twist of her lips. “I don’t see a mating mark.”
“You checked my entire body? You pervert. At least ask before you skeeve on my private bits.” I couldn’t resist the urge to needle her, to drag this out until the pack came.
She’d been right. Of course, they’d come for me.
I’d do the same for them. As much as I wanted them to tuck tail back to Montana to save themselves, they wouldn’t leave us behind.
I didn’t see Moose or Locust, but I sensed them close. Both still alive…but barely.
The beefy vampire hit me again, but I’d expected it this time, giving in to the force to make it hurt less.
“I am curious,” she said, tapping her lip with one finger. “How does it work between the three of you? Ava and Poe marked each other. You marked Poe. But neither of them marked you. And now…what? An incomplete bond? Will Poe’s wolf reject one in place of the other?”
How did she know so much about shifter mating bonds? How did she know so much about my bonds to my mate and my wife?
She must have read the surprise in my eyes, even though I tried to keep my expression neutral.
“Oh, I’ve been watching you for a very long time,” she said. “Well, not you. You’re hardly interesting enough. But that beautiful wife of yours.” Evelyn clicked her tongue and grinned. “My, my, my. What I wouldn’t give for twenty minutes alone with her.”
The visual churned the inferno in my gut, boiling my blood, seizing my lungs.
I pulled in a breath and let it out slowly, telling myself to calm down.
My wolf wanted to break these silver chains, tear her throat open, and rip out her heart.
He’d never had much patience. But I sat as still as I could, willing her to keep going, to reveal her hand.
“But alas, the best-laid plans and all that,” she said. “That was something my brother was always good at, taking what I wanted and smashing it to pieces.”
“Marx,” I said.
She hummed with a shrug. “Twins. Both in life and in death. Our maker turned us together. She liked the symmetry of two souls brought into the world together and leaving it together.”
I couldn’t help the sardonic chuckle that echoed up my throat. “Well, that’s shot to shit now, isn’t it? Marx went down screaming like a fucking bitch—”
Evelyn hit me this time, another hard thwack across the cheek. Maybe I deserved that one.
“I know what your kind did to him,” she snarled. “How that bitch tore out his heart and ripped off his head. Fucking savages.”
I focused on regrouping, on not being too snarky lest she decide to be more lethal. I could handle a few smacks. I did not want her sinking her fangs into my carotid.
“You think I want to spend my time with your kind? You think I like tracking useless shifters across half of Europe?” The black veins under her skin squirmed, and she grimaced like she was fighting off another wave of anguish.
“That Kennedy bitch did something to us. She cursed us. And now look at me.”
Kennedy bitch?
Did she mean Maeve?
“Her fucking spawn weren’t supposed to receive the moon gift. They weren’t supposed to shift. That’s what we were paid for. And now, look at this mess. As usual, I’m the one who has to clean it up.”
I put that together with what I already knew.
Bridge had said the ritual Marx was doing was a suppression curse, meant to keep a shifter latent so that he could siphon their magic and make himself more powerful.
But the way Evelyn was talking, it sounded like both she and Marx had been paid something a long time ago, something meant to keep Ava and her sisters from shifting.
Was she talking about Priscilla Kennedy? And who the fuck paid them?
She might have read the confusion in my eyes as horror or disbelief, because she sighed and shook her head.
“Trust me, I know what this makes me.” She laughed, low and humorless, pressing a hand to her throat.
“I didn’t give a shit about shifters before all this, before I agreed to help my brother and paid for it with…
whatever this is.” Her gaze found mine, and for a heartbeat, the vampire fell away.
I almost saw something human in her stare…
almost. “Your wife…your mate…will die screaming. And I’ll take everything her blood is worth.
Believe me, I know what I am, what I’ve become.
I’ve made my peace with it. If it means I get rid of this wretched plague, I’d do it a thousand times over. ”
I blinked and scrambled for a way to get out of this. Fury engulfed my senses, blinding me, and my wolf growled, extending his claws in preparation for a fight. He wouldn’t let Evelyn have Ava. He’d throw himself in front of any magic, any ritual, any spell, to protect her.
“No matter,” Evelyn said, brushing her hands together like she was clearing off dust. “The Vanderbilt bitch will come, and I’ll finish what we started all those years ago, and we can be done with this nonsense.”
Not revenge. Not even a grudge. Whatever she and Marx tried to do to the Kennedy bloodline had backfired. Now she had to finish it to cure herself.
“Ma’am,” said a smaller woman from the doorway behind Evelyn. “The moon is almost in the correct position. We’ll need to get started. Any word on the sacrifice?”
Sacrifice?
That got my wolf’s attention. Whose? I had to get out of here. I had to get my shit together and break out of these fucking chains and…what? Find Moose? Find Locust? I didn’t even know where the hell we were, much less how to find my brothers and escape to safety.
Evelyn turned to me again. “Well, shifter? Any word from your so-called mate? Is she close? Is she coming?”
The smaller woman came closer, and a static charge wafted off her, hitting me between the eyes. She smelled like incense and fire and earth, something distinctly magical. Witch.
“Check him,” Evelyn commanded. “Verify the sacrifice will still work.”
The witch stood in front of me and put her hand under my chin, forcing my gaze up to hers.
I didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.
I should have closed my eyes. I should have made a better attempt to guard my mind, maybe conjured thoughts of a peaceful ocean or remote forest. Instead, the witch cracked me open like a ripe peach, splintering any guardrails I thought being a supernatural being gave me.
She dug through my soul, crawling over my memories like a spider. I tried to think of anything except Ava and Poe, anything except the pack, but she was like a bloodhound, sniffing them out anyway.
“Don’t struggle,” she said telepathically, a surround sound to my internal horror. “It will hurt less if you cooperate.”
“Fuck you,” I spat. My wolf howled, hackles raised.
He bared his teeth at the intruder, and just when he was about to sink his claws into her magic, she found what she was looking for—the tiny, barely there thread connecting me to Poe.
She gave it a tiny flick, watching it hum and echo through my body.
Then my wolf clamped his fangs around her presence and severed the connection, forcing her out.