Chills ran down my spine. The lights flashed and the asylum patients were gone. What was in their place, though, was far worse. This had been what had caused Clive to swear as we walked in.
Standing like zombies in the room were humans, women and a few men, stripped naked to the waist, with vampires groping them while they fed. This was what they’d done to Viktoria’s lover Mira, to that poor teenaged girl whose body they’d dumped in the park.
A vampire leered at me while he bit a woman, running his hands down her body. I wasn’t sure I could control the howl in my head. I was holding Clive. I couldn’t hurt him, but my claws poked at my fingertips.
I knew they were vampires. I knew they survived on blood, but bagged blood had been the practice for decades. If these vampires wanted to feed from live donors, there were rules. Clive had explained it all to me long ago. They couldn’t take too much and leave the human too weak to carry on. They had to be quick and discreet, mesmerizing the human so they remembered nothing. And they weren’t to do anything that could expose the existence of vampires. These bastards had stolen humans from town as party favors.
When the leering vamp squeezed the woman’s breast while staring at me, I lost it. I needed to shift and kill everyone in the room. I hadn’t been able to eviscerate those two attendants who’d raped Léna. I couldn’t go back and kill my own rapist again, but I could fuck up these assholes real good.
I found their blips in my head and a second later, the leering vamp’s dust settled on the floor. Another, who was taking off a teen’s pants, turned to dust a moment later. Death was too easy for some.
Vampires edged away from the unwilling blood donors, shooting looks at one another, trying to determine who had the power to kill like that.
Cadmael! I shouted in my head. He’d been leaning against a far wall, gazing at the grotesque display, but he turned when I called him. Clive’s been poisoned. Was I sure Cadmael wasn’t the one who had done the poisoning? No, but I needed help. Clive trusted him, so I put aside my own misgivings.
I knew my eyes had lightened to wolf gold. Feeling woozy when Cadmael arrived at my side, I moved Clive’s head, so he stopped feeding and I said, “Take care of him for a minute.”
I stalked across the room and pulled up the shirt hanging from the first woman’s waist and guided her toward the door. I left her beside Cadmael and went for the next. When a vamp stepped in front of me, I walked around him. “No. You will not do this,” I snarled, pulling women away from black-eyed vamps with their fangs bloodstained. I think they were so preoccupied by who had just handed two of them their final deaths, they ignored me murmuring to the women and helping them dress. The lights flickered again and I looked up at the chandelier. “Quit it!”
I pulled a man away from a vamp who had had about enough of my shit. He leaned in to attack me, but I slammed him in the stomach with all my strength, making him double over and vomit up the blood he’d ingested.
“I knew I should have brought my sword,” I muttered, collecting the humans they’d stolen, helping them put their clothes to rights. Thankfully, vampires were pretty much all out for themselves, so no one jumped me to retaliate for the humiliated vamp who had just let a wolf get the better of him.
“You steal people, feed from them, sexually assault them, and then dump them in alleys as though their lives are meaningless. You might as well shout from the rooftops that vampires are among them!”
A Renfield reached out to grab me, but I broke his arm while throwing him across the room. The crack of bone was loud in the suddenly silent room. Vamps sidestepped the minion, letting him slam into the wall.
My brain felt like it was on fire but I tried to rein it in, not wanting to hurt the already traumatized humans. “So arrogant and careless. The townspeople will realize what’s up here in this old asylum. Expect a modern-day mob with pitchforks, otherwise known as drone strikes. Do you honestly think they’ll hesitate to level this hellhole on top of you?”
“They are vermin before us,” shouted the asshole whose dinner I had taken away from him. “We are greater, more powerful than puny humans. Or bitch dogs who have no place in this Guild.”
He got lots of agreeing grunts on that one.
“So powerful,” I sneered, helping a man put his t-shirt back on. There were ten humans and I’d been pulling them all toward the door. “And while you’re napping during the day, they can break in and stake you.”
I heard a click at my ear. For the second time this week, someone had pulled a gun on me. I was too angry to think about consequences. If I hadn’t been weakened by feeding Clive, I probably would have crushed as many blips in the room as I could before they took me down.
I was fast, though, especially when I was pissed off. I didn’t think. I just reacted, snatching the gun away and slamming it into the Renfield’s head. Judging by the looks of shock on the vamps, they hadn’t thought me a real threat, more like tonight’s entertainment. The expressions of more than a few became pensive as they seemed to assess my threat.
“Sam.” Clive was pleading with me to stop. Weakened as he was, he couldn’t protect me from all of them and he knew they were about to silence me for good.
“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself. I’m getting these people out of here.”
I heard a thump behind me. “And if she requires any help,” a man in heavily accented English said, “I’d be more than happy to lend a hand.”
I turned to find the dark-haired vampire with the large mustache.
“We’ll be like Robin Hood and Little John,” he said with a smirk, “stealing from the undead and giving to the living.”
Twelve
Where’s Fergus When You Need Him?
“Now wait a minute,” Sebastian said, striding toward our group by the door. “You can’t take them. We have a protocol in place.”
I had my arm around a tiny girl who couldn’t have hit her teens yet, ushering her with the others. I spun back, eyes bright gold. “Does your protocol include the abduction and molestation of children? Do you kill the ones who prove too difficult? I’ve heard people wearing misbuttoned clothing are found dead in alleys in this town. Is that part of your protocol?”
He opened his mouth to respond but said nothing, his eyes turning black.
