Ben felt numb, removed, as she guided him around a corner. His eyes adjusted to the darkness enough to see dim lines making a rectangle in the wall before them.
A door hiding the answers.
“But,” she added, “they wouldn’t let Nolan in, and certainly not his less attractive buddies. And I didn’t feel like vouching for all those obnoxious businessmen, so I . . .” Her hesitation was so subtle he barely even noticed it. “. . . told him about this pleasure house, which was in the Bronx before it moved. I wasn’t interested in coming here that night, but a vampire from a different clan liked Nolan, and she put him under her sway and took him here.”
So his brother had been lured. He hadn’t come here on his own like a businessman who changed colors away from home.
Vindication, Ben thought, feeling as if Nolan’s honor had been preserved. Now all he had to do was catch a killer.
As he clung to that, Ginny took his hand again and guided him toward the door.
A tiny voice inside Ben whispered for him to run down the stairs and out the door, straight back to Texas. But that’s not what he wanted at all . . .
She pushed open the door, and it groaned on its hinges, drilling through his gut.
He moved across the threshold, into a stark room lit by weak flashlight beams angling across the floor like wires set up to trip any trespassers. In their crisscrosses, he saw bodies strewn about: slumped against the walls, napping on the floor, entwined in corners.
One person with long stringy hair—a man?—leaned against the wall, hand to his neck, softly laughing and crying while begging no one in particular, “Please, please . . . again?”
From a corner, a perverse sucking noise drew Ben’s attention.
As his gaze clarified, he saw that a male was leisurely feasting at a heavy-lidded redhead’s neck, their bodies moving in tandem, like sinuous sex.
Next to them, a black, naked woman leaned against the wall, arms overhead as a man and woman licked rivulets of blood from her breasts.
None of them even seemed to realize Ben and Ginny had entered.
He found that he’d gone back to holding Ginny’s hand, clutching it, as a matter of fact, but he let go just as soon as he processed the wrongness of touching her.
One of them.
“Sometimes,” she said, after a pause that he would’ve described as despondent in any other situation, “these vampires meet their human partners in other areas of town. This is a safe place for them to gather. It’s as liberating as Studio.”
From down the hall, Ben thought he heard the snick of leather on flesh, then a joyful scream.
“And sometimes,” Ginny added, “vampires find a victim who’s looking for a certain release, and no club wants that on their hands.”
“Nolan wouldn’t have wanted any release.”
“His death didn’t pain him, Ben,” she said. “He left this world happy.”
“You don’t know that.”
Ginny didn’t say a word.
His temper took control, because he knew he was wrong. He’d seen Nolan’s death pictures.
“Who are these people, the victims?” he asked.
“Not victims, more like willing thrill-seekers, just like Nolan. He didn’t talk about it out loud, Ben, but he had a wild side. You all do to some extent, and that’s why he was easily lured here. He didn’t actively seek it, but he didn’t resist, either.”
Rage seared through him. “So he was sucked dry just because a vamp needed a meal? Are you sure it wasn’t you, Ginny? Or Geneva?”
She stayed stoic. “I told you I’m not a killer. And don’t even think about Geneva.”
He turned on her, quaking. But Ginny stood her ground, only the slight softening of her gaze letting him know that she felt something.
“Ben . . .”
He closed his eyes, as if that could keep all of this out. But then a British-inflected female voice in back of them broke into his fury.
“Hey, Gins. Heard you from down the hall.”
Both Ben and Ginny found a tall woman leaning against the doorframe as if she were posing in a high-fashion magazine. The eerie flashlight beams underscored the bone structure of a model, the stoned cat eyes and plump lips.
“Who’d you bring tonight?” she added, clearly indicating Ben. “A new toy?”
“He’s a friend,” Ginny said levelly. “We can’t stay for long, and he’s under my watch, Amelie.”
“Pity.” The model ran her fingers over her face in sensual indifference.
On the other side of the room, a scream speared the air, and Ben’s heart caught in his throat as he spun around to see one of the vampires impaling the naked woman with his fangs. He slurped at her neck, and she held to him, her face a mask of feverish ecstasy as they moved together, groin to groin. The second vampire merely watched, licking her fingers.
A bite. Was the vamp turning this victim into one of them?
The rogue part of Ben that had fantasized about Ginny back at the club kept watching, wondering how a bite might feel . . .
Then he remembered Nolan.
“So what does this all mean?” he asked Ginny, voice garbled. “Who killed my brother?”
Her eyes widened, as if warning him to shut up. The model froze in surprise, then started laughing. Everyone else in the room was too distracted to respond.
“A brother,” Amelie said. “You brought one of their brothers here, Gins? Kinky scamp.”
“Shut up, Amelie, and move to another location before daybreak. Outside, they’ve caught word of where you’re doing business.”
But the model merely shrugged. “I don’t have the energy to relocate again.”
“That’s because your latest truffle was probably on too much dope and it’s affected you.”
The departing Amelie flicked a wrist on her way into the hall, as if she didn’t care and wanted to go back to her blood.
That left the room in near-silence, except for the sucking, the moans.
Ben shut the laconic sounds out. Which one of these creatures was responsible for Nolan’s death if it wasn’t Ginny? Or Geneva?
“Who did it?” he asked her again, his voice low and threatening. “Which one, Ginny?”
His vampire guide looked as if she didn’t know what else to say as the flashlights whipped shadowed lines over her face.
“Who?” he asked, gripping her shoulders.
She withstood his reaction. Hell, a vampire could throw him across a room, so why should she be afraid?
“The creature that attacked Nolan was taken care of after Nolan died,” she said, looking away. “She was a rookie and didn’t know the ropes, but that’s no excuse for what happened. Nolan didn’t ask for release, and she had no business—”
“This vampire’s been exterminated?” Somehow, not even that seemed good enough.
Ginny swallowed. “Yes. But the vampires in the house heard cops around the area, and they only had time to heal Nolan’s injuries and to hide his bites. They were so busy going after the culprit, seeing that justice was done in our own way, that they didn’t get back in time to remove your brother’s body.”
And there it was.
A story that Ben couldn’t tell anyone because they would think he was crazy. A punishment he couldn’t bring about because the culprit had already been brought to justice.
Nolan had been vindicated.
So why did it feel as if there was still so much Ben had to solve?
Especially within himself.
EIGHT
THE LIES DIDN’T SIT SO WELL WITH GINNY AS SHE led a silent Ben out of the pleasure house.
The sounds of lust and stimulation faded in her ears while they headed back to Times Square, where they were able to catch a cab to his modest hotel near Madison Square Garden. She wasn’t about to let him out of her sight—not in this city, not in the post-midnight darkness. And Ben didn’t question her continued presence. He merely stared out his window on his half of the cab.
Without entering his mind, she found herself wondering if he was truly satisfied with what she’d given him. She itched to know for certain, but she wasn’t about to read him out here in the open.
Had she done the right thing by coloring the truth about Nolan? She’d added enough reality to her story—only hinting that his brother wasn’t as perfect and faithful as he’d seemed— so that this small-town cop wouldn’t get suspicious about a truth that seemed even more terrible now that she had been inside Ben.
Had he touched her in some way? How?
Everything seemed so scattered now, even her justifications. She’d told herself that Ben loved Nolan so much that the real truth would damage him; that if a protector like him discovered anything more about his beloved brother’s true nature, he would feel compelled to keep it a secret from his family because he wouldn’t want to break their hearts, too, and he would suffer under that burden for the rest of his life. This way, he wouldn’t know about the part Nolan had truly played in his own death, and Ben could at least think there was some closure.
He could believe that he knew the truth already, and that might go a long way in keeping him physically and emotionally safe . . .
By the time the cab left them off in front of The Mather Hotel, Ginny could feel the darkness lifting; it would give way to sunrise within a couple of hours.
But she could also sense her twin’s anxiety in the sputter of awareness she’d been shielding herself from.
Ultimately, she and Ben came to stand in a small courtyard off the sidewalk, near the hotel’s tattered, green-and-white entrance awning. Beyond that, weak light from the small but neat lobby filtered over the pavement, and she remained across a line that separated light from shadow.
Ben, of course, kept to the light, as if he were unable to leave it. The idea gripped the heart of her, where emptiness had hollowed her out these past couple of decades.
Where, Ginny now realized, she’d craved something to solidify her ever since she and Geneva had started drifting apart.
She spoke for the first time since they’d left the pleasure house. “I suppose you’ll be going home.”
He stared at the ground, his body still tensed. “I wish I could be sure that Nolan’s murderer was set to rights.”
She couldn’t blame him for that. She’d already experienced his grief-turned-rage, empathizing with him. “You would have liked to bear witness, just like a cop who takes down a criminal and then watches the execution?”
“I just . . .” he said, voice ragged, “I just want some guarantee that it won’t ever happen to anyone else’s brother.”
Ginny struggled to stay calm under the other lie she had told: The vampire who had led Nolan to death hadn’t been exterminated at all.
There were good reasons for that, too, even though deceiving Ben was gnawing at her.
“Hey.” She reached out to touch him, then thought better of it. “Why punish yourself like this? There’s nothing you can do now.”
“It doesn’t seem like enough. As you said, I can’t report this to the NYPD. They’d laugh me out of the city with a boogeyman story like this.” A muscle in his cheek jerked. “I’ve never been so . . .”
As he searched for words, she supplied one. “Helpless?”
His terse nod confirmed that. She sensed that he didn’t want to say it out loud. Not a strong man like Ben Tyree.
She stepped closer, into the light. His skin . . . how it would taste, how his blood might fill up all her emptiness . . .
Juices flooded her mouth. Overwhelmed, she touched his hand.
Zzzzzzeeetch—
It was as if she’d been shocked from brain to belly, one long, fast swipe of electric interference. An ache twisted between her legs, wringing her out until she grew damp there.
Instinctively, she disconnected, an after-sizzle still tracing her skin. She had touched him before but . . .
What had just happened?
She looked into his eyes, just as she had back at Studio when he’d joined her in that dance-floor fantasy, when she’d imagined what it would be like to seduce him.
His gaze returned her own carnal yearning and, in a silver-bolted flash, they were connected again, in each other’s heads.
In this new fantasy, he stood in front of her, pausing, then ripping off her dress in a show of dominant passion. He was taking his frustration and anger out in a very physical way, and she liked it, inviting him to go on.
His fantasy-self took her up on that, cupping the back of her head with his rough hand, kissing her deeply, savaging her with lips and tongue, his hand slipping between her thighs to stroke her to pure agony. She saw . . . felt . . . his fingers thrusting inside her, making her cry out, working her into wet, frenzied submission . . .
Yet as her cry reached a peak, hanging above the shared fantasy like a glass pane ready to smash over them, something changed.
Something in his eyes.
In her . . . soul?
No, not a soul. She’d given it up during her exchange with Sorin, leveraged it in a bargain she hadn’t regretted until lately.
As their gazes intensified, the cry remained poised above them . . .
Then it broke, showering down and slicing into her skin, revealing an impossible future in every shard:
Her and Ben, flesh to flesh, limbs entangled as they pressed together.
The two of them again, sitting on a hill after dusk, her back to his chest as he traced her cheek with a finger.
Gray-haired Ben leaning over her, his aged hands touching her still-young face . . .
As the imaginary shards hit the ground, Ginny shook herself out of the shared fantasy. Her head swam, her hunger screeched.
“What was that all about?” she heard Ben say, words strangled.
“I have no idea.”
“I think you do.”
He reached for her hand again, as if to validate what had just come between them. But Ginny was too fast, dodging farther into the darkness.
“It happened back at the club, too,” he said. “I saw it in your eyes. What kind of mind games are you playing?”
She didn’t know herself. She’d never lost control with her powers, so there was no explanation for what he did to her. Unless . . .
Did every contact with this particular human infuse her with a sense of his humanity?
She wasn’t sure if that were possible, seeing as she hadn’t stuck around L.A. to see her breed of vampires evolve. But she had never known this to happen with Sorin, who had cut off contact with humans after taking up with the twins. Sure, he had said he possessed emotions for Ginny and Geneva— his only children—but he’d only used the concept of love to control, and that’s all. And since the sisters didn’t have any siblings—only progeny whose blood and powers grew weaker with every generation—there was no basis for comparison.
“Okay, so the games continue. Is that it?” Ben went back to the angry man who was aching for an outlet to relieve his sorrows. “Maybe you didn’t have your meal yet tonight and that’s how you get your victims ready. Is that how it works?”
“No. I mean, yes, Gen and I use our eyes and our voices, our sway, but . . .”
“But what?” He angled his head so that his neck was more exposed—a cruel taunt. “I’m not as good as Nolan?”
His agony at always being the second-best brother, at losing the one he’d always looked up to, weighed on her. But her hunger overwhelmed even that. It pistoned through her, threatening to take over if she allowed it to.
“You don’t mean that,” she said.
“Maybe I do.” His eyes were wild. “Maybe I want what my brother found. You said he wasn’t in any pain. But that’s all I’ve seen so far in life, and I want to believe you.”
The rest went unsaid: And this is one thing I can finally share with Nolan. One thing that I’ve been searching for in the eyes of all those victims I’ve never been able to help . . .
Her hearing picked up two voices coming dow
n the dark street, and she retreated even farther back into the courtyard. Soon, a couple rounded a corner and drunkenly stumbled toward the lobby.
Even after the interruption, her body was still primed, her cravings at a famished peak.
Ben was asking for a bite, she thought. He was angry yet willing, and she was so starved.
As the night went quiet again, the sounds of the city only a background hum, Ben’s voice broke in. He had calmed down a little, his shoulders losing their taut line as he rescinded the offer of his neck.
“Do creatures like you turn every victim into a vampire?” he asked quietly.
He was curious about the bite, of course. His rage was cooling into stone-cold logic now, and that was even more dangerous than fury.
“No,” she said. “There needs to be a blood exchange, and having a son or daughter is a big responsibility.”
She risked a look at him, finding an expression of such naked vulnerability on his tough-man face that it melted her.
“There’s always been a purpose to my bites,” she added. “Once, I created a family for my community, but I never . . . felt it. I’ve actually never felt it.”
“What do you mean—felt it?”
How could she explain this to a human? “I mean that biting has always been a means to an end for me, whether it’s a meal to appease hunger or a way of carrying out my maker’s commands. Back when Geneva and I were new, a bite was more of a duty that we performed. Our brood needed citizens, so we turned the willing ones. There wasn’t any emotional link beyond that.”
She thought of the Groupies: fans of the Elite vampires who had given their mortality to serve the higher beings in the Underground. The Elite were, more or less, celebrities who gave their souls to reinvent their careers. Meeting them had been so exciting at first to her and Geneva. They’d thought to establish business connections Underground, just as they had as hopeful human starlets. But the Elites were so self-involved that they only saw the twins as underlings.
“So you’ve never experienced a true bite?” Ben asked. “Not even from the vampire who turned you?”
Ginny’s arousal diminished, just like that. The loss pained her.
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