Adelie yelped with her own climax.
I sucked at his wrist as the two of them wrung the sex from each other.
This time, I sealed his wrist for good and laid it across his chest.
Adelie collapsed on top of him. “Mm. Gwen. Isn’t he wonderful?”
“Oh, I can see you enjoyed him.” I patted her on the shoulder as she made herself comfortable. “Don’t forget to go to bed at some point, Adelie. We have a Challenge tomorrow.”
“Mm.” She groaned as she looked at the man underneath her. “Get hard again, Rinaldo. I want to go again.”
I laughed as I walked away. Poor Rinaldo. He would be so sore tomorrow and have very little to remember for it. Adelie would probably leave him some nice memories, though. She loved her little human pets.
I meandered through the rooms, looking at the faces of the humans and vampires, some engaged in simple drinking, other in more torrid sex acts. There was nothing short of an orgy in another corner of the room. I started to count the bodies and laughed when I got to ten, and I wasn’t done. I gave up trying to count. They were moving too much and were enjoying the pile they were in.
When I spotted Cato in a different corner, with a woman who looked frighteningly like my mother, I had to leave the room before my night was spoiled.
I walked through the now virtually empty dining room to the dance floor. More humans and vampires to watch, and I did revel in this. Adelie had been right. This was a much better version of the Blood Rite. Everyone, even the humans, was enjoying themselves.
I wanted to throw myself into the utter debauchery of the show, but I had a Challenge the next morning and waking up still drunk and probably sore, was a bad idea. I permitted myself one more human, though.
Watching the bodies swirl and loop, I spotted a few men who interested me. They were all starting to look tired, and it was going to be time to either bed them for real or send them home. I wanted one that was not overly tired.
A man on the other side of the dance floor caught my eye. He wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t breathtakingly handsome, but as Adelie’s Rinaldo, something was interesting and alluring about him.
Crossing the dance floor, I took his hand. “A dance, sir?”
He spun me out onto the floor and pulled me back into his arms. “With a gorgeous woman like you? Of course.”
I smiled, humored by his flamboyant words.
“You are utterly beautiful.”
I laughed. “I am wearing makeup.”
“I can see it in your eyes.”
I let them spark red. “Can you?”
“Mierda, that’s hot. How did you do that?”
“Come closer, I’ll tell you.”
I quirked my lip in a smile as he lowered his head to my mouth.
Sinking my fangs into his neck, I drew on his vein—
I jumped back away from him in the next instant, and spit the blood all over his face.
Poison.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
~ GWYNNORE ~
The human was poisoned.
I stared at him, horrified.
In the next second, he fell to the floor dead. Someone had been controlling him, keeping him alive until someone took a taste.
No, I corrected myself as I could still taste his blood on my lips, not just someone. Me. They’d found a man they knew I would find attractive and made sure he was in my path.
Moving to the wall, and keeping it to my back, I stared at the melee. There had to be someone in here who hated me or wanted me dead. The blood had been made with killing me in mind, I just knew it. It would be my luck. And they kept the human alive for me.
Were they still here?
I stuck to the edge of the room, my vampire senses as acute as I could force them—with all the drunken blood in my body. I was glad I hadn’t thrown myself into the revelries. I’d be dead if I had. Moving quickly into the mostly empty dining room again, I put my ass in a chair and my back against the wall.
Poisoned human. They were trying to kill me.
Who were they? Who would try to kill a candidate when they were still in the trials? More than one of us had failed and died, or failed and been sent away, so it wasn’t as if the possibility of me dying wasn’t a factor already.
I wanted to enjoy this day.
I wanted to win my own personal challenge—and now it had all been tainted.
“Where the hell did she go?”
Somehow, I knew the whispered question just on the other side of the wall was about me.
“I don’t know! She slipped away. I expected her to go toward the door, and instead, she disappeared.”
Did I know these voices?
“We have to find her. She has to die.”
“I fucking know that, asshole! I don’t know where she went. She spat the blood back out, and now she knows we’re here. Come on. Let’s check the rooms outside the celebration. Fuck, why didn’t that work?”
I heard their footsteps as they started to walk away, and I stood to follow. But with the way my hair was styled, there would be no mistaking me for anyone else. I pulled the wig off and grabbed a human close by, stripping her cloak off and shoving the mass of hair into her hands.
Putting her in Thrall for just a moment, I had the woman put the wig on as I pulled the cloak on and swished away after the footsteps. I could see the two people who had been talking moving quickly away from me, sweeping and searching the crowd. Lifting the side of my shift, I pulled out the short sword I carried when I was leaving the stronghold.
The two figures, weaving through the oblivious crowds, met up with a third and fourth person.
One snapped, “Where is she?”
The woman, who had originally been looking for me, turned around and scanned the crowd, glancing right over me because I was wearing the black cloak and had lost the hairdo. I stifled my gasp and turned to watch from the corner of my eye.
Hortensia. I knew her. She was the candidate prospect one step below me. If I had said no to the trials, then she would have been the candidate. She was a horrible hag, no matter how beautiful she appeared.
I never considered the other potential candidates would want to kill me. But it made sense. Kill me off, and they moved up to a candidate. They’d be closer to being the queen.
Hortensia, though? She was just pathetic.
I glanced again and caught a flash of another pale face in another cloak.
It was her daughter. The nasty child named after the goddess of wisdom. Athena.
Well, well. Her daughter wasn’t so pathetic. She was ruthless and intelligent.
This was double bad.
Even if I won the throne, Hortensia would never stop trying to win. She was going to try to kill me. Either I could walk away and hide in my room, or I could take care of my business right here, right now.
This was a show of my own strength.
Someone had to die for this transgression. Going after Athena seemed wrong because she might just be her mother’s pawn in this. So I had to go after her mother, then.
The four offenders were on the move again.
Athena veered in a different direction with one hooded figure.
Hortensia stayed close to the other in a cloak.
I moved closer to hear over the music what they were saying.
“Your daughter fucked this up.”
“Shut up, Umar. She’s nothing without me, and you know that. You sent her off to control the human, and you didn’t tell me. I would have insisted one of us keep an eye on her. She is still young, no matter how smart she is.”
“You think she’ll do whatever you tell her, Tensia?”
“Yes, she will. She’s my creation, and she knows it. She doesn’t care for the crown, but she understands I do. All I have to do is kill that twat and mate with Nial.” Her head moved again, scanning the room for my flowers and hair. She gave a pouty stomp of her foot. “Where the hell did that bitch go?”
Umar snorted. “You’ll
never control Niallan. You know that. He will string you up by your toes and drain the blood from your groin so you can drown in it as it fills your nostrils.”
Her face twisted. “Must you be so gross?”
“I’m a vampire, you stupid cunt. Lest you forget, I regularly rip throats for pleasure.”
“Hunting.” She shivered in revulsion. “Oh, there! There she is!”
The two of them marched into the parlor where there were a lot more vertical bodies around to hide my smaller stature. I saw the hair and flowers moving happily through the crowd, stopping to say hello to people, and bobbing on.
Hortensia and Umar were watching and closing in on my wig and flowers. They were careful and stuck to the darkest shadows. They got very close before they made their move to grab the woman wearing my hair.
Umar wrapped an arm around the waist of the woman and pulled her back into the dark. I could still see the flash of steel, a dagger at her throat. He hissed, “Hello, Gwynnore.”
The poor woman was startled and terrified, and I made my move.
I wrapped my arm around Hortensia’s shoulder. “Why, hello, Tensia. How are you?”
I poked the sword into her back, delight spreading through my blood as she gasped in shock.
Umar spun, dragging the woman around with him. He was clearly stunned.
I grinned at him. “Did you really think I would be that vulnerable after tasting poisoned blood and watching the man die on the dance floor?”
“You bitch,” Hortensia ground out.
“Me? You sent a poisoned human into the Blood Rite. How many vampires are now dead because they tasted him before the poison was fully bloomed, huh? You don’t deserve the crown you covet, and you sure as hell haven’t earned it.”
“Let her go,” Umar demanded. “I’ll kill this little human bitch.”
“You mistake me for my friend.” I snorted. “I don’t make pets of humans.”
He drew the knife across her neck, and she dropped to the floor, gurgling her last breath through her gouged throat. I stared at him standing there, licking the knife as he smirked. Umar asked candidly, “And you’re not bothered by that?”
“Not even remotely.” I wasn’t sugary sweet and shit.
He pulled out a gun and pointed it at me. “How about this?”
I twitched an eyebrow. “I don’t know… How about this?”
I drove the long knife up into Hortensia’s back, up through her heart, and out through her breastbone with a shattering crack. Umar pulled the trigger when the knife poked out of her chest, but I merely moved Hortensia’s limp body into the trajectory, and the bullet lodged in her brain.
I proceeded at vampire speed, yanking the knife out, letting her nearly lifeless body fall to the ground. I spun and whirled the blade up at an angle at Umar. I sliced clean through his neck before he even released his finger from the trigger. His head just sat there on his shoulders, his permanent expression in death one of surprise.
I grinned and nudged his head off his body, watching as it fell and rolled away from me, stopping with dead eyes staring at me.
Grabbing Hortensia’s body, I lifted it up at an angle and sliced her head clean off in an easy move, and kicked it over to rest next to Umar’s—side-by-side, their lifeless eyes gazed up at me.
Failures. The both of them.
Athena and the other companion stood mere feet away, their mouths agape.
The companion lifted his hands as if he were going to move against me.
I whipped the bloody knife up. “Try it. The aesthetic would be even better with a third head staring dead at the ceiling.”
The room erupted in applause. The humans watching had thought it was all a show for their entertainment, so I whipped around and bowed to them, accepting the praise for something they didn’t even understand. As I turned to leave again, I found Lord Otto and Cato standing in the shadows, three body lengths away, their expressions void of any emotion.
Apparently, they had been spying.
And they had let me handle it.
I threw the knife on the floor in front of them. “Clean up on aisle ten.”
Someone’s muscled arm wrapped around my waist from behind, lifting me off my feet.
Then I was yanked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
~ KIMBER ~
Jallina sat at our usual spot in the coffee shop.
She jerked her head up when I sat down and gave me the biggest grin I had seen from her in months. “Kimber? That’s really you?”
“Certainly is, Jallina.”
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I’ve missed you these past few weeks.”
Nodding, I squeezed her hand back. “I have missed you, too. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to do…anything.”
A small, proud smile danced across her lips. “You are quite the celebrity around here.”
Laughing, I sat back in the chair and shook my head. “I don’t mean to be.”
Once I ordered my coffee, Jallina sat forward and wrapped her hands around her mug. “Are you still teaching?”
I shook my head. “No. They took me off that duty a while ago. I train with magic most of the time now. I don’t even know why. And you? What are you doing?”
“Same thing I’ve always done. Organize the shelves and books in the library. Though they have me checking the returns now as well, for damage, so life got a little more exciting.”
“Baby steps, Jallina. You’ll get to director eventually.”
Her eyes were fixed on the coffee foam in her cup, and she grunted. The mood at our little table changed immediately.
“Is something wrong?”
“No…”
My head tilted in curiosity and I waited.
A deep sigh preceded Jallina’s explanation. “Everything has changed now, Kimber. You and Elex are not around because you’re off being important at the temple, but the rest of us have splintered apart. And not for the reasons you think. Not because you and Elex were the glue of the group—”
I laughed. We weren’t. We so very much were not.
“But we have changed. Our group has…morphed.”
“Morphed?”
She swirled the coffee this time and nodded slowly. “Morphed. Like rock under pressure. I guess none of us ever saw it because we were young and used to each other. Once you and Elex disappeared up to the temple, we all came to odds.” A little chuckle escaped her. “Drez and Milgran came to more than odds. I think they are both still sporting black eyes.”
“What on S’Kir happened?”
“The temple, if, she looked through the coffee shop before looking back at me. “Let’s talk elsewhere. There are ears here.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t reassured. There were ears everywhere. I didn’t understand why she was so worried about being overheard, either.
Passing a dozen other little shops after paying for our drinks, Jallina stopped in front of a door that had nothing more than a mark in the corner.
I knew the mark well. It was the mark of the temple.
Jallina gave a furtive glance up and down the street before she pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It was as though I had stepped back into the temple I had walked away from angrily just an hour ago. The smells, the sights, the lighting. Everything was familiar. “What is this place?”
My friend didn’t answer right away. She swept her coat off her shoulders and hung it up before motioning for me to do the same.
She led me, still quiet, into the depth of the room and sat at a table. I sat down across from her, the question still hovering between us, unanswered.
A young man, dressed as an acolyte in the main temple, hurried over.
He gasped when he saw me and dropped into a deep bow.
“How may I serve you, Lady Raven, Mistress Topir?”
“Two coffees,” Jallina answered, and the acolyte disappeared.
When had I started thinking of acolytes
as separate from myself?
Jallina finally answered my question. “This place is an outlier temple. It is a safe house, a place where people come if the temple is too far for them to walk or they fear something between here and there.”
My face must have given me away.
“You didn’t know about these, did you?”
“No. Not at all.”
Tracing a pattern in the wood of the table, Jallina took a moment to gather her thoughts. “When they call us infants, Kimber, they are right. We may be closing in on our first century, but we do not know the ins and outs of this world. There are still a lot of things we won’t know for a long time.”
I put a hand to my head. “I just had this conversation.”
“What?”
“With Mistress Danai. It’s why I walked away from the temple for a while. I needed to clear my head.”
“She’s right if that’s what she told you.”
The acolyte placed the mugs of hot, rich coffee on the tabletop between us and left a plate of sugars and creamers.
In companionable silence, Jallina and I made our coffees the way we liked, the way we had left them at the coffee shop.
I took in the room around us a little bit more.
It looked a lot like the temple but was clearly not meant for dedications and prayers alone. The room was more functional, more welcoming.
Certainly, much more versatile, as evidenced by the delicious coffee.
“What happened?” My quiet words didn’t seem to break our pleasant silence too uncomfortably.
“There were arguments. When Milgran realized you were the one at the temple and spreading the news of the Breaking Times, he was… angry.” Jallina snorted in the coffee impolitely. “Well. Perhaps angry was an understatement. He was furious. He was at a loss for words, and he wanted to…”
She cleared her throat, trying to put off what she was about to say.
I waited.
“He wanted to go there and…kill you. At first. He calmed enough within a few moments to amend that to take you away from the temple, but Drez and I heard the words leave his lips.”
A week before, a day before, I would never have believed that Milgran would say such a thing. Either sentiment, killing or kidnapping.
Queen of Gods Page 16
