The human was poisoned.
I stared at him, horrified.
In the next second, he fell to the floor dead. Someone had been controlling him, keeping him alive until someone took a taste.
No, I corrected myself as I could still taste his blood on my lips, not just someone. Me. They’d found a man they knew I would find attractive and made sure he was in my path.
Moving to the wall, and keeping it to my back, I stared at the melee. There had to be someone in here who hated me or wanted me dead. The blood had been made with killing me in mind, I just knew it. It would be my luck. And they kept the human alive for me.
Were they still here?
I stuck to the edge of the room, my vampire senses as acute as I could force them—with all the drunken blood in my body. I was glad I hadn’t thrown myself into the revelries. I’d be dead if I had. Moving quickly into the mostly empty dining room again, I put my ass in a chair and my back against the wall.
Poisoned human. They were trying to kill me.
Who werethey? Who would try to kill a candidate when they were still in the trials? More than one of us had failed and died, or failed and been sent away, so it wasn’t as if the possibility of me dying wasn’t a factor already.
I wanted to enjoy this day.
I wanted to win my own personal challenge—and now it had all been tainted.
“Where the hell did she go?”
Somehow, I knew the whispered question just on the other side of the wall was about me.
“I don’t know! She slipped away. I expected her to go toward the door, and instead, she disappeared.”
Did I know these voices?
“We have to find her. She has to die.”
“I fucking know that, asshole! I don’t know where she went. She spat the blood back out, and now she knows we’re here. Come on. Let’s check the rooms outside the celebration. Fuck, why didn’t that work?”
I heard their footsteps as they started to walk away, and I stood to follow. But with the way my hair was styled, there would be no mistaking me for anyone else. I pulled the wig off and grabbed a human close by, stripping her cloak off and shoving the mass of hair into her hands.
Putting her in Thrall for just a moment, I had the woman put the wig on as I pulled the cloak on and swished away after the footsteps. I could see the two people who had been talking moving quickly away from me, sweeping and searching the crowd. Lifting the side of my shift, I pulled out the short sword I carried when I was leaving the stronghold.
The two figures, weaving through the oblivious crowds, met up with a third and fourth person.
One snapped, “Where is she?”
The woman, who had originally been looking for me, turned around and scanned the crowd, glancing right over me because I was wearing the black cloak and had lost the hairdo. I stifled my gasp and turned to watch from the corner of my eye.
Hortensia. I knew her. She was the candidate prospect one step below me. If I had said no to the trials, then she would have been the candidate. She was a horrible hag, no matter how beautiful she appeared.
I never considered the other potential candidates would want to kill me. But it made sense. Kill me off, and they moved up to a candidate. They’d be closer to being the queen.
Hortensia, though? She was just pathetic.
I glanced again and caught a flash of another pale face in another cloak.
It was her daughter. The nasty child named after the goddess of wisdom. Athena.
Well, well. Her daughter wasn’t so pathetic. She was ruthless and intelligent.
This was double bad.
Even if I won the throne, Hortensia would never stop trying to win. She was going to try to kill me. Either I could walk away and hide in my room, or I could take care of my business right here, right now.
