Tremaine let Patrick go long enough to backhand him across the face with enough force to knock him to the ground. Pain spiked through his head from the blow, the magic making up the circles stinging his skin. Patrick blinked, shoving himself to a sitting position despite how much his head ached now.
“Starting the interrogation early?” Patrick asked as he stared down Tremaine.
The audience of humans and vampires were becoming a mix of incandescent fire and dark holes in his vision. Magic users of all kinds had the ability to see people’s auras, that extension of the human soul. All it took was a little magic to slip their vision sideways in order to see that brightness. They could handle it for a short period of time before they needed to revert back to normal eyesight to prevent damage.
Mundane humans couldn’t see a person’s soul at all, not on their own. Shine made it so that no one could escape the burning brightness of auras, and the only reprieve was the emptiness that vampires carried because the undead had no souls.
Patrick closed his eyes, but that didn’t help; he could still see the afterimage of shining souls on the back of his eyelids.
A cold hand grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, the charms embedded in the leather enough to make Tremaine hiss, but not enough to make the vampire let him go. The thing about vampires was they could live long enough to survive the consequences of their actions, and tonight was no different. Patrick swallowed against the taste of the dead on his tongue as Tremaine hauled him to his feet. An unfamiliar high scratched at his mind, making the tips of his fingers tingle with a sensation Patrick rarely experienced outside of sex.
“The interrogation hasn’t begun,” Tremaine said, pulling Patrick uncomfortably close.
Patrick forced his eyes open, the master vampire limned in light that burned. The body he was pressed against had no warmth, no heartbeat, nothing of substance that Patrick should want—but he did.
The pull of forced desire was an unwanted curl of heat in his gut that made bile crawl up his throat. Patrick’s shields wavered against his bones, and it took every bit of his rapidly fading concentration to keep them up.
“You won’t win this fight,” Patrick promised. “Lucien looks forward to a change of ownership and bringing you to heel.”
Tremaine laughed, harsh and low. “He will take nothing from me. I learned the bitter lessons of laying waste to my world from him, and I learned them well.”
“Not well enough.”
“Lucien turned his back on Tremaine, and I showed him a new way forward. Do you know what you mortals used to sacrifice to me?” Tezcatlipoca asked as he pressed himself up against Patrick’s back, the gold chest plate digging into his spine. One heavy hand reached around to press over Patrick’s heart, fingers digging into the scar tissue there through his shirt. “Your life. Your heart. Your very soul.”
Trapped between heat and cold, with unwanted hands sliding over his body without his permission, all Patrick could think about was how much he wanted to say no—but how some part of him kept thinkingyes.
The push of Tremaine’s mind against his own didn’t help. Persuasion was a power all vampires had, though the degree to which they could manipulate a person was different. Patrick squeezed his eyes shut, falling deep into half-remembered SERE training to help keep his focus for as long as he could. He retreated behind his personal shields, though he knew they were a stop-gap only.
“Get your hands off me,” he ground out.
He needed to say it, not just think it, butnowasn’t always respected. Tremaine laughed, his hand sliding down Patrick’s chest to cup his cock through his jeans.
“You’ll see how we worship now,” Tremaine said.
The cruel promise in his voice was a nightmare Patrick wanted no part of. His fingers twitched with the need to call his magic, but he knew if he did, it would count as breaking his word and only make the high worse. Shine was eating away at his sight, at his concentration, chipping away at his resolve with every minute that passed. The drug was hitting hard and fast, buoyed by the black magic that lived inside the stagnant blood that sat in vampire veins.
Magic which Patrick’s body did not like at fucking all.
Tremaine let go of Patrick’s clothed cock after a hard squeeze, only to grab him by the upper arm and drag him toward the heavy double doors past the dance floor that led to the back of the club. Two vampires darted ahead to hold the doors open. Patrick couldn’t quite keep his footing, and he stumbled, both from the brightness and the speed at which Tremaine hauled him forward.
They bypassed storage rooms and a break room, heading for a heavily warded door at the end of the short hallway. Tremaine opened it, the door swinging wide on its hinges. Inside was a heavily barricaded and reinforced steel vault that wouldn’t look out of place in a bank. Vampires didn’t use coffins to sleep these days, despite what the stories said. Instead, they used what could pass as bomb shelters.
Even in his altered state, Patrick knew this would lead to the heart of the Manhattan Night Court.
“We had a bargain with the Dominion Sect,” someone said from behind them.
Patrick laughed, shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of some people and how they thought they could outsmart a god. The back room grew brighter in sections, washing out the halogen glare from above. The vampires who blurred through the room to open the vault door and stand guard were bits of dark respite in Patrick’s vision he didn’t trust.
“Kill him,” Tezcatlipoca said with the casual disdain of a god who expected to be obeyed.
Loyalty was either bought or earned; that had been true for millennia. Tonight was no different. Patrick sluggishly craned his head around, watching from a drugged distance as the warlock with the concentric circles tattooed on his hands had his throat torn out by a vampire eager to obey. Magic sputtered and died around the warlock as blood splattered across the floor. Patrick blinked, the body seemingly falling in slow degrees to the ground.
“Killing their mouthpiece won’t stop you from owing them,” Patrick slurred.
Tezcatlipoca’s aura burned like the sun when the god stepped into view. Patrick had to cover his eyes with one hand, but that didn’t stop them from watering.
“I promised them nothing.”
