by Meg Xuemei X
“Cass baby,” Pyrder cut in, “have you tried wine-tasting in wild country vineyards? It’s spectacular. I’ll take you—”
“Cass, sweetheart,” the demigod called me again.
What were they doing? I turned my head left and right when they called me until I became fed up with the show. If I let them, these two, who were engaged in a pissing contest, would pull each of my arms in a different direction until I split in two.
I raised a finger in the air. “Hold your horses!” I turned to Alaric with a glare. “First, I’m not your sweetheart.”
“I’ve never called another sweetheart, not even in the middle of the heat in the bedroom,” Alaric said, and my heart jolted at the sex images his words brought to the forefront of my mind.
The dream I had about him rushed right back, and suddenly I was so turned on. This was stupid. My body was stupid. I resorted to intensifying my hard stare and let fire swirl in my eyes.
“Everyone is scared of me except you,” Alaric said softly. “And that makes you my sweetheart. Consider it a compliment.”
I would argue what was considered a compliment later. “Afraid of you?” I snorted. “Are you a comedian?”
Pyrder shook his head and laughed. “That’s the best comeback I’ve ever heard.”
I ignored him. I wasn’t done with Alaric. “Second, there’s no little bird telling you anything. Lorcan found you, didn’t he? He won’t appreciate you calling him a little bird. What he asked you to do no longer applies. Anyway, where’s that vampire of the night?”
Pyrder chuckled louder. He really liked that I was ridiculing everyone except him.
I glanced around, waiting for Lorcan to jump out of the shadows—that was what the High Lord of Night was good at, right? I waited three seconds before sending my magical sense out to feel him—I’d been practicing sharpening my senses ever since I’d gotten out of the cage.
Lorcan wasn’t here.
But I met an unexpected presence—a power stalking mine.
Before I could judge it, the sentient power boldly licked me with a smirk. It was delicious and familiar, but I didn’t give a shit. No one licked Cass Saélihn without permission.
I formed a fist and punched the power right in the face, harder than necessary. The power blinked in shock and faded out with its tail between its mighty legs.
Alaric threw his head back and laughed in glee.
The bastard was testing me. I should have shoved my black fire up his ass as a welcome gift instead of only slamming him back with dignity.
“Our Cass doesn’t like being pampered,” he told Reysalor’s twin.
He called that pampering? This demigod was really rough around the edges. And theirs? No way! I belonged to no one but myself. I narrowed my eyes.
Then they both sniffed, just like Reysalor and Lorcan had when they had first entered my presence.
Their eyes widened, their nostrils flaring, as if my funky scent slammed them right in their handsome faces.
I could understand Reysalor’s and Lorcan’s shock. As humiliating as it had been, when they’d first found me, I’d looked like filth and had smelled even worse.
But before I’d come to the club, I’d taken a long bath with good soap. These two shouldn’t have reacted as if my scent threw them for a loop. Plus, if I’d smelled bad, Reys wouldn’t have given me an oral pleasure. Thinking of Reys’s wicked tongue and the way it had worked on me to my first orgasm had my blood heating. Would he do that for me again when we returned?
Wait a second!
Maybe these two assholes scented my arousal? I was constantly turned on, sitting between them with their delicious, pure male scent crushing me. Pyrder had a panther in him, so surely he could smell anything animalistic and base. And Alaric was a powerful demigod—I’d never asked Reys which god sired Alaric or if he was a bastard offspring.
My face reddened, my humiliation turning to anger.
“What the fuck are you two sniffing at?” I asked, my fist forming on the table. “Maybe you’re the ones who need a long shower and scented soap!” I bared my teeth. “Get honey and vanilla.”
They blinked, then roared with laughter.
I thought of letting out my black fire, but I’d promised Reys I wouldn’t draw any attention.
I’d said fuck the rules, but I didn’t want to upset Reys too much. I liked the food and bath he provided for me.
“Dicks,” I said, shaking my head in pure disgust.
“You have no idea, do you, Cass baby?” Alaric said. Now he was using Reys’s endearment to provoke me. I liked to challenge people too, to assure my dominance, but not now. The demigod seemed to be the other side of the coin. “You’re what I hoped for, but I didn’t expect you to be so foul-mouthed. I kind of like it.”
The best strategy was to ignore him, or deal with him after I got my drink. Which was what I came here for, and I wasn’t going to let anyone, especially these two top-of-the-range assholes, stop me from getting what I wanted.
The redheaded bartender had been darting his nervous gaze between the three of us. I slammed a palm on the bar and he jumped.
“Dude, where is my drink?” I asked. “I was rudely interrupted, but you should have fixed me the Devil’s Love by now.”
“I sincerely apologize, Cass.” The redhead was able to think on his feet after a quick recovery. “As I said, Devil’s Love went out of fashion a couple years ago. We no longer make it.” He eyed me with uncertainty. “You couldn’t have had that drink a few years ago, could you? You’d have been underage then.”
So, I’d come here for nothing. My eyes blazed with fire, not real fire, but the redhead stepped back in caution.
“Give Cass whatever she wants,” Pyrder said sternly. “Just fix the drink for her.”
“I–I don’t know how, sir,” the redheaded stuttered. “I only started working here three months ago. But they banished Devil’s Love because it was bad luck. The rumor says every time they made the cursed cocktail, a fight broke out and someone died.”
I snorted. “Because the devil—” I paused my retort. They did not fear the devil. The citizens of Earth were terrified of the Olympian gods. “—or the gods paid a visit every time you guys fixed a glass of cocktail that’s named Devil’s Love?”
“I can make you Rainbow-All-the-Way, our newest arrival,” the redhead offered hopefully. “It’s the most popular drink now.”
I stared at him hard.
Pyrder sighed. “For fuck’s sake, how hard is it to make a cocktail?”
He walked around the chair. With one hand pressed on the bar, he leapt and landed behind the bar with all the grace of a panther. The redhead moved himself to a corner to make room for Pyrder.
“I’ll make DL or whatever shit for you, Cass baby,” Pyrder said.
Which meant he was going to make shit instead of the Devil’s Love.
“What’s all the fuss?” a familiar voice asked to my right. It sounded nearly identical to Pyrder’s, but an excellent ear could tell that Reys’s was grittier while his twin’s was on the silky side.
Reys wrapped his arm around my waist possessively.
He must have been watching us the entire time he’d been talking to his spies. My superior hearing caught their conversation now and then, and it was all boring shit about the gods and their moves. Even so, he’d never let me out of his sight, though he didn’t have a good view of me. I could tell he was annoyed that he’d had to rely on his guards to keep track of me.
Yet he hadn’t broken in because he was curious about how I would play with his twin and the demigod. I knew it, as if Reys and I already had some kind of bond. And I knew he’d been itching to come to me. Only his self-discipline had kept him in his seat.
I grinned. “Reys!” I was happy to have a backup, and Reys would always be in my corner. I leaned closer to him and pressed a hand on his broad, hard chest.
“They refused to make me the Devil’s Love,” I whimpered with a pout, ignoring the
withering look the redhead flashed me. He seemed to want to protest but was too afraid to tick off the three alpha males around me. “And I’m not confident in your twin’s skill. I think he’s going to make shit and call it Devil’s Love.”
Even the other two bartenders chuckled. So, I was spot on—Pyrder Iliathorr was a fae prince who had no business tending a bar.
The only two who didn’t laugh were Alaric and Pyrder. They both stared hard at Reysalor, and there was a sinister threat in Alaric’s eyes as he watched Reys and I get cozy.
“Reysalor Iliathorr,” the demigod drawled. “You know we have a pact.”
“I didn’t violate it,” Reysalor snapped, his grip on me tightening. “I’ve been holding back, which is the hardest fucking thing to do!”
I narrowed my eyes. A pact? Reys had told me he couldn’t fuck me because of the pact. Was this the pact he’d been talking about? What the fuck was going on?
“She isn’t yours only, Reysalor,” his twin said quietly, his turquoise eyes flashing darkly.
Had he meant me? What was I? A bone?
Terrible tension between the three males whipped through the air, and just when I was about to punch my way to get to the bottom of this pact, a cool-mannered, gorgeous bartender glided toward me with a large V-shaped glass full of dark red liquid.
The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. I wasn’t sure if it was because of this violet-eyed bartender, who seemed to carry a potent scent different from everyone here, or because I was finally getting my drink.
I dismissed the former idea, since the club was full of colorful supernatural characters and a variety of scents, even though Alaric also gave the new bartender a wary look before fixing his attention on me again.
Three cherries, a string of green leaves, and a few ice cubes floated on top of the glass. The drink fit the profile of what I had seen in my dream-visits. The color was also right. However, I had no way to tell if the taste was authentic. I could only hope that the bartender hadn’t cheated me.
He placed the glass in front of me with a charming smile that somehow had teeth and claws. I blinked away the odd impression of him.
“I made an exception for you, Cass,” he said. It was obvious that everyone here had good hearing, and now everyone knew I was Cass. “The Devil’s Love is actually my design. I’m honored you insisted on having it.”
I gave him a thumbs-up. “Good man!”
My three companions, who had the highest testosterone level in the room, growled at the bartender. He stepped back, raising his hands in the air in surrender. He didn’t seem like a fae, and he was hiding a power I couldn’t discern, as inexperienced as I was.
It didn’t matter. He looked friendly.
“Hey, he fixed me a drink,” I said. “Give the guy a break.”
Before I wrapped my fingers around the stem of the glass, Reysalor took it from me.
“Hey!” I glared at him. “That’s my drink. That’s what I came here for!”
“I need to make sure it’s safe for you to drink, Cass baby,” Reys said.
I sighed. His self-appointed role of my food taster was getting tiresome. He would only relax in his own house at the edge of the Academy.
Reysalor took a sip and frowned. “I don’t see why it was ever that popular back then.”
The violet-eyed bartender looked offended, but then he gazed at me expectantly, as if my judgment was all that mattered.
I snatched the glass from Reysalor’s hand. “I was waiting for you to choke, Reys.”
I picked up a cherry speared by a toothpick from the glass and popped it in my mouth. As I bit into the cherry, I took a big swig of the cocktail.
It tasted like sweet fire, then suddenly there was nothing but fire.
The intense liquid blaze rolled down my throat, burning a path to my stomach.
“Fuck!” I cried. “Devil’s Love is inferno and mortal sin.”
The men around me roared with laughter, the tension among them diffused.
A satisfied, inhuman, and malicious light shone in the bartender’s eyes.
“Our Cass is fun,” Pyrder said. “I’m keeping her.”
Except it wasn’t fun for me. My throat closed, and the fire in my belly exploded like fireworks in disarray.
I dropped the glass, and it shattered under my seat. I threw my head back, my hand stretching ahead and trying to grab something to support me, the other clutching at my throat. My eyes rolled to the back of my head, and I let out a shriek of pain.
My blurring vision caught Reysalor, Pyrder, and Alaric closing in on me in a protective formation, and my ringing ears heard them calling my name in panic. At the same time, the violet-eyed bartender punched Pyrder in the face, a sword suddenly appearing in his hand, and he lunged at me. The thick, oak wood bar didn’t even pose a barrier for him. He went right through it.
Reysalor pushed me behind him, and then threw me to the floor to avoid the strike of the bartender’s blade. Reys was incredibly fast, as was Alaric. Before I went down, I saw the demigod go for the bartender like a flash, his flaming sword that was just like Reys’s crashing into the bartender’s broadsword.
The magical alarm chose this moment to go off, joining the frightened shouts and chaos in the club. The front door banged open. Through the space of chair legs, I saw men wearing suits pouring in as the panicked patrons rushed toward the exit.
Vampires wore suits.
Among them, Lorcan’s potent presence punched into me, even in my painful condition. It took me no time to realize that he was wounded, the tang of rustic blood, metal, and smoke coating his usual scent of faint pine and fine wine.
My worry for him only made my air passage lock tighter, and I couldn’t breathe.
“The gods have infiltrated this place,” the High Lord of Night shouted. “Where’s Cass? We need to get her out. Now!”
22
I wanted to howl in pain, but I couldn’t utter a sound. I scratched at my throat, needing to tear it open to have air.
Why did it feel like the déjà vu? Did Jezebel have a hand in this? This agony was different from the pain her spells had inflicted upon me.
Reysalor pulled me away from the fighting between the violet-eyed bartender and Alaric. Pyrder was battling a team of mages coming out of the shadows of the club. The long bar had shattered into splinters. Broken bottles and shards of glass littered the floor.
Everyone shouted over the sound of the blades clanging together. Lorcan’s vampires and Reysalor’s fae warriors all joined the fight.
We had been ambushed.
Things broke everywhere and bloody bodies and limbs piled up rapidly.
Misery Twist had turned to a slaughter house.
The poison that the bartender had delivered down my throat amplified my senses and sharpened my pain to extreme. Every tiny sound hurt my eardrums, and everyone was so fucking loud.
I tried to whimper and, again, I made no sound.
No air made its way into my lungs.
“Cass!” Reysalor called urgently, fear and panic storming in his darkened turquoise eyes. “Cass baby, breathe. Please, try to breathe, baby.”
If only I could.
My eyes rolled back at the lack of oxygen. I clawed at my throat until I was sure I had torn my flesh from my body, but that pain still couldn’t compare to the fire searing my lungs and throat.
I couldn’t move my hands anymore, because Lorcan crouched beside me, pinning my hands to my sides, so I wouldn’t tear my flesh off. His long trench coat was soaked with blood—his and his enemies’.
“Don’t hurt yourself!” he ordered, as if I was his vampire soldier. “You need to fight, Cassandra Saélihn! Fight back and breathe! Survive this!”
I hated him calling me Cassandra. He’d done that intentionally to kick the fight into me.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying. I was fighting to death to get air! I would give up anything for just one mouthful of air. My lungs burst in pain.
And I hadn’t lived. I’d just had the Devil’s Love, but it was the most lethal poison.
Painful thoughts swirled in my mind. Why hadn’t the drink affected Reys? It had somehow bypassed his senses and immune system and aimed right at me.
The highlight of my short life.
If I had known this was my end, I’d have gotten Reys to fuck me properly. If this was how I had to die, I was glad at least it wasn’t in that fucking cage. I’d had my first taste of fresh air. I’d gazed up at the sky, traveled to the Academy, and seen a burned city across the river. I’d had an orgasm and felt a powerful cock fill me, if only for a moment.
I had come to the club I’d dreamed about and demanded the Devil’s Love, which had been my fatal mistake. It was a shame that I couldn’t have a piece of that chocolate mousse cake Boone had promised me.
Reysalor was now doing mouth-to-mouth on me, trying to force air into my throat, but it wouldn’t take.
“It’s not working,” Reys said in a tight voice, turning to Lorcan in desperation.
Lorcan cut his wrist and dripped his blood into my mouth. His blood of ancient power had once reduced my pain and partially healed me.
“My Lord,” someone said beside us. “You can’t bleed anymore. You’ve lost too much blood.”
Lorcan snarled, and whoever had spoken backed off immediately.
His blood filled my mouth and I gagged. My throat was sealed. How could that even happen?
“It’s not working,” Reysalor shouted in rage and fear. “You’re drowning her in your blood, vampire!”
“Whose fault is that?” Lorcan barked back. “You should never have exposed her before she was ready. If she dies, we lose everything. Every civilization will be wiped out. I’ll kill you myself.”
The fate of civilization had to do with me. But if Lorcan actually didn’t need me in order to save the world, would he care about my death?
