But I only heard one voice. Oddly, it was Brown’s.
“Uh, Delaney? Delaney?”
“What?”
That’s when I noticed how pale Brown had gone, all the shadows of his face a sickly green, his eyes too wide and almost cat-feral.
“It’s here.”
He was staring up at my house. I turned to look, but it was just my house, up there. Nothing different.
Then pain hit me searing in a ripcord of through my chest and throat, burning too hot at the bite at my neck, exploding in my brain.
Come to me.
It was a whisper. It was a force that shut down every scrambling thought, every scrap of fear that fell useless through my grasping fingers. There was nothing. Nothing but that command.
Come to me.
I lurched, stumbled to keep my balance, blind with the need to follow. I would throw myself against walls, stone, broken glass to get to the one who owned me.
Not the demon. It was not Bathin’s whiskey and smoke in my mind.
It was snakes and oil, filth and hunger, rotted needs ambling through me, plucking, biting, sucking. It was Lavius.
Fight him.
The concept disappeared even as I thought of it. There was no world around me but his words, his needs.
I staggered up the stairs, my breathing too hard, everything hurting, and everythingcraving. I wanted him. Wanted him to want me. Wanted to throw myself at his feet, would carve a vein open for him and beg him to drink, to touch, to own.
Something in me was screaming.
Someone near me was yelling.
Someone was on the phone, I don’t know why that detail stood out, but it did.
And then there was a hand wrapped around the front of my throat, a palm too cold to be alive.
“You are mine,” Rossi said. The tiniest prick of pain flickered near the bite on my neck, and I struggled, fear finally huge enough to reach me even without a soul, even under Lavius’s compulsion. The pain at my neck slipped away, was gone. I shuddered and sobbed.
Did Rossi just bite me?
“The hell, Rossi.” That was Ryder. That was also the sound of a bullet being chambered. “Let go of her.”
Things were not going well. Not at all. And I had no control over any of it, could barely track it all.
That,that, was enough to make me panic. But all my body could feel was the echo of panic, too far away, as it shook me and sent sweat down my spine.
“I didn’t bite her,” Rossi said. “It’s a mark. With the blade. Her blood on my tongue a promise. Proof of what she is to me. If you want her alive by the end of this, Ryder put your damn gun away and follow my lead.”
I couldn’t see Ryder. Couldn’t make my body move. I was caught there, at the top of my long stone staircase, staring at my front door, Rossi pressed close up against me, cold as marble, unyielding as steel.
And furious.
That, his fury, and his claim on me, protecting me with my blood on his tongue, settled something in me.
Which, I know: weird. But he had always been in my life. A kind, if quirky figure. Loyal to keeping our town safe. Good to the people under his watch, and good to me.
