Jono watched as Carmen’s glamour sloughed off like water, her true form slipping into reality. The twisted horns of her kind spiraled away from her forehead and curved back over her skull. Brown eyes with the dark red pupils that marked her as a succubus took in the club. Desire rolled off her in waves that Jono could smell, but which didn’t have any effect on him. He’d never quite figured out if it was his strain of the werevirus or his patron that enabled him to withstand manipulation like this.
Patrick grimaced, and between one breath and the next, Jono lost his scent as he tightened down his personal shields. Jono looked worriedly at him, and Patrick shrugged.
“I don’t want to fight with a hard-on,” he muttered.
Jono snorted. “Would rather we weren’t here fighting at all.”
Lucien slung his arm over Carmen’s shoulders and veered to the left, the hostesses no longer interested in keeping them out. Arousal thickened the air around them, focus turned toward carnal wants rather than what their employer dictated they do. Succubi were distracting that way.
On either side of the floral wall, the marble floor turned into several steps that met dark red, wall-to-wall carpeting on the main floor. Lucien and Carmen led the way, with Einar prowling behind them. Jono and Patrick took up the rear, and he let his eyes wander over the crowd in the club.
The building had been hollowed out for at least three floors, with a short mezzanine one might find in a theater jutting out from the rear of the building. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, but Jono easily picked out more modern light fixtures tucked away in hidden recesses. The walls were made of wood panels interspersed with iron molding instead of wood, the better to anchor wards and spells with. Jono tracked the iron over every wall, noting how it all disappeared into the next floor when it didn’t twist over the ceiling edges.
As cages went, the Crimson Diamond was a good one.
Men and women dressed in expensive suits and dresses mingled in small groups around tall glass bar tables or lounged on chaises. Not everyone was human, but those that were either worked at the club as human servants in the literal sense, or were there as showpieces. The showpieces, as far as Jono could tell, were food, and high out of their minds on shine.
When they weren’t sprawled across the laps of the wealthy or cradled in their arms, shine-addicted humans undulated seductively through the crowd. They begged for relief from the brightness of the souls they could temporarily see in the only way they’d get with their chosen drug—through sex and darkness.
Couples or groups drifted in and out of a pair of elevators that most likely led up to the higher floors in the building. Jono didn’t need to think very hard on what they’d find up there because the vampires enjoying their spoils on the main floor weren’t shy about the way they fed on the addicts.
Lighting was low-lit, giving the club an intimate feel, and the music was more background noise than anything else. The dance floor the gathering areas encircled and which the mezzanine overlooked was surprisingly empty. Past it, along the far wall that didn’t lead to the loo, were two sets of double doors guarded by more vampires, the employees-only signs discreetly labeled.
Jono swallowed against the scent of everything around him, the chemical aftertaste needing something stronger than saliva to wash away. He wondered at how no one seemed to notice them as their small group walked on by, until he remembered the mageglobe in Patrick’s hand.
Magic wasn’t making them invisible, just unnoticeable. People looked right through their group as they made their way to the grand staircase that led up to the mezzanine against the side wall. The staircase was blocked by multiple vampires who didn’t seem quite keen on being in such close proximity with each other. Considering the meeting they were about to interrupt, it stood to reason these vampires belonged to different Night Courts.
Jono saw Patrick clench his fist, snuffing out the mageglobe, and with it, his magic. The vampires in front of them became immediately aware of their presence, heads snapping around to stare at them in shock.
Lucien let go of Carmen and strode forward with all the swagger of an apex predator.
“Move, or I will kill you,” Lucien ordered.
Jono saw the hesitation in one or two of the vampires, the older ones who maybe knew who Lucien was. The younger, brasher vampires bared their fangs in a challenge they were destined to lose.
Jono had heard stories of Lucien through the years, hushed rumors of the mad vampire who held no treaties with any human, who claimed no territory in any country. Yet he had evaded any and all law enforcement with ease to build a criminal empire the envy of anyone who lived on the wrong side of the law. A vampire whose Night Court was smaller than all others in the world today, but whose reputation was enough to make any master vampire think twice about moving against him.
Lucien proved why in mere seconds.
With a speed even Jono was hard-pressed to track, Lucien tore into the vampires blocking his way with hands and teeth. The brutal fight was a blur of torn limbs and dark blood, with Lucien a whirlwind at the center no one could stop. The handful of vampires who hadn’t dared step up to the fight weren’t spared either, and the last one to try to flee ended up with Lucien’s hand buried in his chest.
The vampire’s mouth worked soundlessly, his hands coming up to clutch at his chest. Lucien put a foot against the vampire’s legs and shoved him forward, the motion wrenching his own hand free. He came away with a black heart that didn’t beat clutched tight in bloody fingers.
The commotion hadn’t gone unnoticed. Casual conversation had stopped, the music almost too loud in Jono’s ears. Lucien stepped over the bodies and headed up the stairs, biting into the heart as he went, all eyes in the room on him.
“Is this the way you greet your master, Tremaine?” Lucien said, not bothering to raise his voice. Everyone with enhanced hearing and who was paying attention would hear him.
Jono was acutely aware of the silence that followed Lucien’s question.
Einar extended his arm to Carmen and guided her through the mess of bodies on the floor. If the vampires’ Night Courts claimed them, got them somewhere safe, then some of the undead might be salvageable after a day’s sleep and enough blood from willing human servants.
Jono doubted the one whose heart Lucien was eating was ever coming back.
He caught Patrick’s eye and tipped his head at the stairs. “We going up?”
“Yeah,” Patrick replied.
Jono’s boots squelched in the blood saturating the red carpet as he stepped over the bodies. It didn’t escape his notice that Patrick kept his hat pulled down low, face averted from the curious eyes of the club guests who’d been offered unexpected entertainment for the night. It probably wouldn’t bode well for people to recognize him here. The SOA didn’t really need the headlines that would generate, not after what happened during summer solstice.
