Chapter 17
“Tear open your veins!”
Only the burning in his forearms pulled Will from his trance. With a curse, he pulled his fingers from the raw skin of his wrists, where his nails had been trying to rip into the blue veins beneath. His hand still twitched, wanting to dig back into his flesh until blood flowed.
His mind returned only slowly. He clenched his hands into fists, but his thoughts remained sluggish, as though wading through syrup.
“Hit yourself in the face!”
Voices cackled in his ears, laughing as he instinctively raised his hand. Drew it back. Stopped himself at the last second.
Furious, he shook his head, trying to tear away the cobwebs that reached deep into his soul.
His surroundings came into focus only gradually.
He stood in red-painted corridors he had never seen before.
They shone wet with a thick coat of lacquer, every inch of wall and ceiling drenched in color.
Even the marble floor was the shade of dried blood, and crimson moss gathered in the corners, spreading across the stairs and passageways that branched away in every direction.
Slowly, Will turned in a circle, trying to orient himself. He had no memory of how he had come here. One moment, he had been standing with Elodie in the crowded ballroom, half listening to political gossip, and then… a brief sting.
He frowned. A group of laughing nobles watched him from the top of the stairs. One of them held a thin blade as long as her finger. She raised it to her lips and licked away the blood still clinging to it.
“Watch yourself, outsider!” one of the men laughed.
“That was far too easy,” the girl agreed, her lips red.
Will instinctively touched the small cut on his neck. “You…!”
But they were already gone. Only their laughter lingered in the corridor.
He quickly checked himself over and buttoned the cuffs of his shirt. Where had he lost his jacket? He found a mirror between two paintings. His fingers moved to his lips—did they feel swollen? He pushed the thought away. His gaze settled on the small cut at the back of his neck.
“Fucking bastards!” But the curse did nothing to soothe his anger. They had stolen his blood. The blade had been so sharp that he had barely felt the cut, and then he had been left helpless, stripped of his own will.
If a few children could control him so easily, he did not want to imagine how completely the Red Hand could overpower him.
Will tightened his cravat around his throat and looked around. He was still somewhere inside the Red Hand’s mansion, and Elodie’s warning returned to him. But what good had it done when he had not even been safe in the ballroom?
With no idea where he was going, he turned into the first corridor.
He soon discovered that the ball had two faces.
He passed walkways where, hidden up in shadow, he could look down at the dancing couples, where people laughed politely and swayed to the music.
Elodie was somewhere among them; again and again, he caught a glimpse of her scarlet dress spinning through the crowd.
But instead of leading him back to the ball, the corridors drew him deeper into another world, one that quickened his pulse and left his skin hot.
He passed through rooms where naked bodies met in a different dance, moving to the rhythm of their own music.
He found places where pleasure and pain became one.
Through a narrow door, he entered a room where a man hung in chains while people licked his wounds and sucked blood from his hard cock.
Flickering lights, black walls. He stumbled into chambers where women sang, and statues spoke.
He staggered through stairwells where guests sank into drugged stupors.
He walked along passageways where the darkness lived. He touched walls that had a heartbeat.
He fled into a courtyard filled with cold autumn air.
Panting, Will stopped and drew the clean air greedily into his lungs, trying to purge the last traces of the mansion’s hot, humid breath.
Here, the light was silver, the night blue, and the sky vast. His steps slowed.
He retied his braid and straightened his shirt, which now clung damply to his chest.
To his surprise, the courtyard wasn’t empty. An altar stood in the center, and shadowy figures formed a broad circle around it, three rows deep. The entire scene, and the man at its heart, lay bathed in moonlight.
For one moment, Will feared he had wandered into yet another nightmare, but then he recognized the man leading the ceremony, and a faint smile touched his lips.
Mr. Arcos held one hand above the dark body on the altar and, as the ritual came to its end, let his blood drip into the monster’s mouth. Will recognized the red script suspended in the air and the swaying, chanting figures. A lifeless chimera lay before him.
“Take my blood. Serve the one who gives you life.” Mr. Arcos’s voice carried far into the night.
His hand glistened, drops running down his arm.
Will hated that he looked handsome even now.
His trousers hugged his hips, but he wore only a black shirt, its sleeves rolled up to expose his forearm.
A streak of red crossed his forehead, where he had apparently pushed back a strand of hair without thinking.
“Awaken.” The command was soft, almost tender.
The chimera’s chest rose. It sat upright—a hulking creature with grey skin, massive and crude.
Mr. Arcos stroked its leathery forehead as though it were one of his dogs, and the confused creature leaned into its master’s touch.
Everything about the gesture was so different from the terrible chaos of Elodie’s ritual two weeks ago.
Then the shadows at his feet moved.
Three mountains surrounded Mr. Arcos. One was the ogre-like creature on the altar, still half entranced. Around his legs coiled the reptilian tail of another chimera, a serpent with scales and too many claws, yet tame as a cat. Farther away, a third body waited for Mr. Arcos’s life-giving hands.
At that very moment, Mr. Arcos’s eyes snapped to Will, as though he had known all along that Will was watching.
His brows darkened—irritation seemed to be the only response Will could ever draw from him.
Even so, he stroked the chimera’s astonished face one final time before sending it toward a chained vampire with a nod.
In the next instant, every trace of innocence vanished from the creature as it charged its victim.
The ground shook beneath each step. With a primal roar, it opened its jaws over the vampire’s head, sank its teeth into the skull, and bit clean through.
Mr. Arcos did not so much as blink. He merely stared darkly at Will.
“Want to see a better show?” someone beside Will asked suddenly. Three young men in fine clothes passed by and beckoned for him to follow. He hesitated, but it offered the perfect excuse to escape Mr. Arcos’s gaze.
“Perhaps you can tell me how to get back to the ballroom,” he said, marveling at the confidence with which they navigated the maze.
“You’re from the Capitol, aren’t you? Forget the dance floor. We’ll show you the real party.”
They were probably a few years younger than Will and so unmistakably noble that he almost saw the blue blood pulsing beneath their skin.
They questioned him greedily about the Capitol and tried to outdo every one of his descriptions with something from Bloodgrove.
Yet he held their attention because he possessed the one thing no one in this city could offer them: stories of the wide world.
Back inside the mansion’s heat, they found a bottle of liquor, and Will followed them into the labyrinth of corridors.
Warning bells rang in the back of his mind, but they had been ringing ever since he boarded the train to Bloodgrove.
The young men were confident, a little arrogant, and completely unaware of how deranged their anecdotes sounded to an outsider.
But they treated Will as one of their own, and on a night like this, that felt like the safest place to be.
“What do you know about Duchess Ormonde?” he asked eventually. They had just turned onto a narrow spiral staircase winding down into the rock. Red light played over moss spreading across the walls like tumors, while the sounds of sex echoed up toward them.
The blond young man ahead of him turned, eyebrows raised. “She’s mad. She murdered her father.”
His friend behind Will laughed. “We should emphasize that those are only rumors, of course. But they say she poisoned his blood until he lost his mind and became a vampire. An exceptionally embarrassing affair for a family of such high standing.”
“Auntie says he was already mad and dragged the family name through the mud until there was nothing left of it. When we were schoolboys, we used to dare one another to look through his windows or ring the doorbell. The butler would always come running and try to beat us—as though he had any right to.”
The conversation died off as they reached the bottom of the stairs and entered a dimly lit vault. A man who looked suspiciously like a doorman examined them closely, making Will hesitate. At a ball like this, there should have been little left that needed to happen behind guarded doors.
But the nobleman behind him eagerly pushed him forward, and a new spectacle opened before Will.
At first glance, it looked like another chamber devoted to pleasure, equipped for bondage and gagging.
Men and women were strapped to benches and beds, hung from the ceiling, or spread-eagled across crosses. Guests used them for their amusement.
Then Will realized what the second sound had been, the one he had been unable to identify in the stairwell: bone-chilling hissing and roaring of vampires.
The restraints held their heads and arms in place, and most had their legs in chains as well.
One female vampire wore a muzzle, baring her teeth wildly inside it while a guest forced himself on her on the bed.
Another had nearly bitten through the piece of wood jammed between his jaws like a bridle.
Shocked, Will looked at the young nobles. They laughed proudly. One seized a female vampire by the hair where she had been strapped over a leather bench and yanked her head up.
“Charles, isn’t this your cousin?”
They laughed again. His cousin. Eighteen years old. She had succumbed to bloodlust two months earlier, they told him.
The girl still looked so human. She fought wildly and desperately, torn between the urge to flee and her hunger for blood.
Her eyes shone with tears, though everything that had once been white was now red.
The man taking her from behind slapped her backside.
She hissed and snapped at his hand, but the buckles held her fast. The skin beneath them was rubbed raw.
Will barely heard the nobles debating whether Charles should fuck his cousin. He stood with one hand covering his mouth and felt the images burn themselves into his soul.
Slowly, he turned and walked away.
But he did not get far. He stopped on the first stair and stared at the wall while the noises reached for him with thorn-covered hands, tearing wounds into his heart.
Weakly, he braced himself against the slick wall. He had reached the point where he could not even vomit anymore. His hand sank into the strange growth, so thick here that it swallowed his fingers.
But none of it reached him. White noise roared in his ears, mercifully drowning out the sounds from the chamber. Yet the images remained before his mind’s eye—pulsing, blinding, corrosive. He did not care that they were vampires. To him, it made no difference.
“Pup.”