Dmitri closed his eyes. Roger felt no emotions flowing from him other than a desperate desire for everything to end. Before he delved too deeply into that, Roger walled Dmitri’s psyche from his mind. There was nothing he could do to help him out of that sinkhole, and he couldn’t afford to tumble into it after him.
“I always expect hunters to be tastier than they are,” Lucille commented. “You’d think people steeped in magic and exercise would be divine, but that one was just lacking.”
Anton put his arm around Lucille’s shoulders, leaning on her. “Perhaps it was just that one, not the whole lot of them.”
“Roger, you’ve been having hunter blood lately,” Seamus remarked. “Has it been worth it?”
“Blood is always worth the effort,” Roger replied smoothly. “The only drops I didn’t enjoy were when we fed on rats.”
“I’d nearly forgotten about that. Now I wish I had.” Seamus put his hand on Roger’s shoulder. “Go on now, take your pick.”
Denying a gift like this in front of the coven would make a statement and would likely put him on the stage floor beside Dmitri. Hoping his smile didn’t show the strain compounding in his mind, he nodded to Seamus. He strode slowly over to the remaining three hunters and took his time evaluating them.
All three bore the same tattoo as Zack: the woman had it on the back of her left shoulder, a man closer to thirty had it on his upper right arm, and the youngest man—at most a few years older than Zack—had it on his left leg, near to his hip. Though the tattoo was in different places on each, the magic was similar to the one that protected Zack.
Roger had been intimate with the perpetual spell’s power for months. The shielding was magnificent but not impenetrable. The easiest way through was with permission. That was the only way he’d ever slid through Zack’s mental defenses.
But that wasn’t the only route. Roger gauged each of his potential choices. The woman and the older man both had their chins raised, a defiant look in their eyes. What little Roger gleaned from them was a desire to make their last moments count. Roger had seen their like before. If they were tortured, their hollow lives would crack into pieces. Anton liked to play with his food, but these two would bore him quickly. He’d kill them within an hour, as would any other vampire who got their hands on them.
But the younger man struggled to contain his fear.That’s the one. Subtly, Roger slid his ring off inside his pocket and left it there.
He stepped closer to the boy and put a hand on his cheek. Tears had soddened the gag, though he wasn’t currently crying. He shivered from Roger’s touch. Skin contact made access to the boy’s fear simple.God, does it run deep. He was exactly the sort that Anton and Seamus might take months to kill, possibly years if they felt like it. They’d age the boy’s fear like wine and drink from him in sips until they finally,finallytired of him.
Unless Roger claimed and killed him.
Gently, Roger guided the boy toward the front of the stage. The crowd of vampires in the audience was the coven’s most influential. They were the ones he had to seduce. They had to see that he was not beholden to hunters or to Seamus.
The energy onstage shifted as Roger claimed the attention. He’d been the center of focus before such a crowd many times, though usually under his own making. He and Candide used to lecture on the craft of dominating a pet with and without the use of vampiric magic. How many of the vampires that had answered Seamus’s summons remembered those demonstrations?
No matter. His focus had to be on the boy. Carefully, he undid the gag and drew it out of the boy’s mouth.
The boy’s tears began anew. Hands still bound to his chest like a supplicant praying, he sobbed, “Please.”
Roger put his thumb over the boy’s lips. He couldn’t stand to hear more begging. In theory, he could take this boy home. But if the boy wouldn’t stay, if the others thought that made him weak, then every step he’d taken to protect the ones he cared about would be washed away.
Death was coming, and Roger would rather deliver it than receive.
Relying on his vampiric power, he slithered his control through the cracks of the boy’s mental armor. Fear rocked the boy’s mind, but he reached into the turbulence and offered balance. He stepped to the side so the audience could witness how the boy’s tremors stilled. Those with an observant eye would be able to see his own red eyes and the boy’s hunter tattoo. They’d notice that Roger was able to overcome a magic that should have rebuked him.
From balance, Roger guided the boy’s mind away from fear, settling him into a calm peace, for all mortals craved calm deep in their souls. The boy’s shoulders relaxed, and tension melted from his posture. Keeping a hand on him, Roger strolled around his backside. As he went, he let the distance between them grow until, by the time he reached his other side, he only brushed him with his fingertips.
The boy’s head naturally turned toward him. The wide-eyed fear was replaced with a spark of intelligence. With his panic dulled, perhaps he was thinking through the situation clearly, taking stock. He glanced from Roger out to the audience.
Roger removed his hand. He still had his hooks in the boy’s mind. He could rip him open and dig for desires to morph and twist into his whims, but he refused.
When the boy finally looked at Roger again, recognition filled his deep blue eyes. He had figured out his situation and knew hisfuture had run out. Despair was quickly turning to a middling acceptance.
His voice cracked from dryness. “Please?”
So many different requests could be bundled into that word, but Roger knew which ones he meant.Please don’t draw it out. Please don’t make it hurt. Please make it quick.
“Of course, darling,” Roger said quietly, confident that the entire room was caught on his every motion.
He swept in close from behind because he had to make a show of this for the room and tilted the boy’s head to the side. He wrapped one around his waist and held tightly onto his jaw. The boy’s heart thundered in Roger’s ears, and the twitch of his pulse caught Roger’s full attention. Blood moving, pumping, rushing—all of it a kind of magic unique to mortals.
When he caught the rhythm of it, when he felt the sway pulling his hunger further and further up from the depths where he kept it at bay, he bared his fangs. The dramatics and the hiss were for the crowd.
Sinking his fangs into the boy’s neck was entirely for him.
