The assistant who wasn’t Estelle climbed into the box willingly, waving goodbye to the crowd. Cash made sure the box was securely closed before stepping away. A circular saw dropped from the ceiling, easily slicing through the wood, splattering the first few rows of the crowd with blood. Blade put his arm around me protectively and I leaned back against him. “There’s got to be a trap door,” he whispered.
“I hope so.” Still, my breath caught in my throat. Estelle fell to her knees in front of Cash, her panic palpable, begging him to do something to help her friend. A puddle of blood spread between them, the ruined box separated.
“Should I bring Sally back to life?” Cash asked the crowd, who roared in agreement. He tapped his finger to his mouth, like he was deep in thought. Bullshit. This was part of his secret plan. He looked back at Estelle, who’d risen from her knees, but continued to plead with Cash. “You know what we need, Estelle?”
She shook her head and held her palms up again.
“A sacrifice.”
Blade tightened his grip around my waist. The volume in the theater rose to an ear-splitting level.
“Do we have any volunteers?” Cash called out.
Estelle’s face brightened, another exaggerated expression, and she looked out over the crowd. People pulled their friend’s hands up, pointed at each other, jumped up and down to get their attention. Estelle pointed at one couple, looking back at Cash for confirmation.
He nodded. “She’ll be perfect.”
The man pulled his date from her chair as she protested, but no one in the crowd helped her. Instead, they cheered him on as he dragged her up the stairs onto the stage. She tried to break free of him, but his grip was too strong.
“I think this is real.” I leaned back so Blade could hear me. “She’s terrified.” The man held her up. Her knees had buckled more than once, and once he let go of her she fell in the puddle of Sally’s blood. Estelle approached the woman, trying to calm her down.
“It’s real,” Blade confirmed. Instead of concern for this woman, I was envious that Blade had any advance info about the show. Cash played favorites, and I was losing so far. I checked my ridiculous emotions and hoped that Cash Logan’s Cirque Macabre had a happy ending.
Cash held his hand out and helped the woman up. He massaged her shoulders. At first, the woman shook violently under Cash’s touch, her face wet with tears. She visibly relaxed, almost as if she fell under a trance. “I think this offering will please the gods.”
He brought his lips to her ear, and she nodded at whatever he said. She hooked her fingers into the hem of her top and raised it up over her head, dropping it in the puddle of blood. The woman made peace with whatever her fate was.
Cash smiled at the crowd, baring his fangs. The audience roared, and began chanting “Bite her! Bite her!” Estelle raised her hands to rile them up more, and I held my breath as Cash sunk his teeth into the soft flesh of the woman’s neck, drinking from her until she turned gray and fell limp at his feet.
Blade’s low moan vibrated through my body.
The crowd rose in a standing ovation as Sally lowered herself to the stage, sliding down Katrinka’s silks. The woman lay lifeless on the ground, forgotten.
“Can we go?” I turned to Blade, completely numb. “I need some air.”
Blade led me out to the parking lot. I wanted to be out of the building before Cash came off stage. I couldn’t talk to him right now. He killed someone. And even worse, all those people loved it.
Chapter Fifteen
“You’ve done that?” I asked Blade as he pulled out of the parking lot. I had no idea where we were going.
“It’s not that sexy when I do it.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “I’m new at this.”
“What are you talking about? Sexy? Please tell me you’re kidding.” This car was seconds away from igniting.
“I mean that when I do it, it’s pretty gross. They fight me, and it’s a mess. I haven’t mastered the mind control aspect of it yet. Cash makes it look like something out of a movie.”
“You weren’t kidding.” My voice faded as I cracked open the window. Oxygen would only stoke the flames, but this car suddenly felt too small.
“I’m a vampire, Holly. That’s the shit we do.” We stopped at a red light, and Blade turned to me, the reflection of the traffic signal glowed in his eyes.
Wait a minute.
The light turned green, but his eyes didn’t change. Someone behind us honked on their horn.
“Your eyes are red.” I was beginning to panic. My new roommate, the man I recently discovered was my father, just killed a woman to get a standing ovation, and the guy I couldn’t stop thinking about had red eyes.
Who was I to judge? I burned my own mother.
“You burst into flames.” Blade’s voice was flat. “That scares the hell out of me.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, and it scares the hell out of me, too.” Blade smiled, drawing me right back in. I could almost forget what I just saw.
My emotions threatened to split me in two. First, I needed to know if Cash had actually killed that woman. She seemed pretty dead, lying on stage, drained of her blood. We hadn’t stuck around long enough to see if she was given any medical care. I didn’t know if I could live with Cash if he planned on so openly...being himself. He was a vampire, but he had other options and I knew it. Blade had walked back into my life like no time had passed. Time was a confusing concept to me, but I knew after a date like we had, two things would happen—we’d be inseparable or we’d never see each other again. There shouldn’t have been a middle, but here it was.
I needed an explanation. “Where have you been?”
Blade mashed his lips together, like he needed to bring my attention to them. “Trying to set things straight.”
“Well, that explains everything.” I rolled my eyes when he glanced over at me. I didn’t want to catch his gaze, there was way too much traffic. We could survive many things, but I wasn’t sure how we’d fare in a car crash. “Care to go into any detail? I’m pretty sure you feel the same way about full disclosure as I do.”
“Right. The girl I was telling you about, my ex, the vampire, she’s got a pretty legit claim to leading the clan. In our vampire line, women are leaders. But if you destroy the clan leader, the job is yours. Callie,” his voice caught when he said her name, “can’t be the clan leader. She’ll ruin this city.”
“Why? Because you’re pissed that she left you?” The temperature in the car was rising quickly. “I don’t understand everyone’s obsession with what everyone else is doing. Just do you, Blade. People will follow you.”
“I am doing me,” he practically growled. “She can’t lead because she’s eighteen years old with no life experience. She ran away from home to be with him. Her parents didn’t even trust her to go to college, or let her get her driver’s license. There’s reason to be concerned. Talis wasn’t just a clan leader, she controlled this city. She had influence over city government, and other controlling interests, if you know what I mean. They won’t take some little girl seriously.”
“I see your point, but it’s still pissing me off,” I said. This new vampire was going to get taken advantage of, no doubt about it. But Blade had been a mechanic before he turned. That didn’t exactly prepare him for leadership, either. “Did Talis put any sort of protections in place to keep order? She had to know that she wouldn’t actually live forever.”
Even if she had been immortal.
Blade kept driving, headed south of the city. “Of course she did. Talis wasn’t stupid. But they’ll crumble, one by one. Talis earned her way to the top, she didn’t screw her way there.” He shook his head. So not over her. “No one respects that. Callie’s already wormed her way into the new contracts for everything concerning Immortal Dilemma and the Alta Vista. That fight I lost, and it’s going to be fun to watch that fall apart. But there’s too much at stake for too many people to let her get her hands on
the rest of it.”
He was pissing me off. “Let me play devil’s advocate. What if she makes things better?”
Blade smiled, and it gave me goosebumps. “It will seem that way, at first. But then she’ll destroy everything, and take what she wants for herself. She’s too immature and selfish to understand the consequences.”
It sounded more personal than anything else. “It sounds like she has a team in place.”
“A very small one, but she does have influence.” Blade didn’t sound as psycho anymore. He was taking this way too personally.
“If you’re going to succeed, you need to separate yourself from her. Or else you’ll never get over her.”
“Impossible.” Blade turned the car off the main road, on to one I wasn’t sure was paved. “I need to destroy her.”
I wasn’t going to change his mind tonight. “Where are we going?”
Blade drove slowly over the rocky road, coming to a complete stop. He pointed at the house we stopped in front of. A mid-century ranch, like so many others in the city. “This is where I used to live.”
Oh. “Is this the first time you’ve been here since you turned?”
“No,” he said quietly. “I drive down here a lot. Sometimes I want to drive and think, and I always find myself in this part of town. It feels normal. But I haven’t been back in.”
“Do you still have a key?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Of course.” He reached to the keychain in the car’s ignition. “But...” He didn’t finish the thought.
“Would it help?” I asked softly, putting my hand over his. His energy flowed through my skin. It was full of conflict. “If you went inside?”
“I feel like a ghost.” Blade’s gaze was fixed on the house. “No one really gets a chance to say goodbye. You never know when the last time is that you’re going to go home. That night started out so good. It felt like a new beginning.”
“It was.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and Blade put the car in park. There weren’t any cars in the driveway. “Did you live alone?”
“No, my brother still lives there. He was my best friend. That’s the part of me that died that day.” Blade’s eyes glassed over and I crawled into his lap. It wasn’t easy, climbing over the gear shaft and wedging myself between him and the steering wheel. He smiled and pushed his seat back to give me more room. Once I settled, he put his arms around me, but we didn’t dare kiss.
“Does he have any idea what happened to you?” Can you make him understand? You’re not dead, Blade.” I smoothed the hair that had escaped from his elastic and bit my lip. “I so want to kiss you right now.”
A sound caught in his throat. “I so wish you would.”
I shook my head. His pain would leave an aftertaste I couldn’t wash away.
He tipped his head back and caught my finger with his lips. Tiny sparks flew off my skin and faded against our clothes. “I don’t know how my brother would react. I can’t decide whether I should leave well enough alone, or if I should risk scaring the shit out of him. I have my memories. Nobody can take those away from me.”
“He loves you. He’ll accept you.” Maybe Blade wouldn’t be so angry if he could have a piece of his old life back.
“What if he doesn’t?” Blade’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “I can’t risk that.”
I nodded, understanding more than I ever wanted to, and climbed off him. “Then you should stop torturing yourself. Don’t come here anymore.”
Blade picked his seat back up and put the car into drive before he had a chance to think about it. “It’s not easy. I know better, but I can’t leave well enough alone.”
“I found my mother.” I blurted out, envying Blade for having the self-control to not ruin what he had.
He perked up. “Oh yeah? How did that go?”
“Horrible.” I held the hand she pushed away in the other, the rejection fresh. “She had no idea it was me, but she knew I was evil.”
Blade shook his head. “She was wrong.”
“I killed her,” I said. He didn’t turn back to me as he slowed down at a stoplight, but his eyes widened. “During childbirth. She burst into flames.”
“Shit.” Blade reached over and squeezed my knee. “I’m sorry.”
“So I understand why you don’t want to go back and talk to your brother. I mean, if that’s what I did to the one person who should love me unconditionally, imagine what I could do to others.” I didn’t have to say including him. He should have run, and we both knew it.
“We’ll learn to control this,” he said as he pulled onto the main road. We were going back to the hotels, and he had to bob and weave or we’d be in traffic until the sun rose.
“But how can we? If we’re pissed, we explode. Love and lust cause me to burst into flames. Are we supposed to go through our whole lives feeling nothing? We’re immortal, Blade. Is that what we have to look forward to, a life of being numb because we destroy what we love?”
“No. I was numb before I met you. You brought me back to life. I died once. I don’t plan on doing it again any time soon.” He pulled into the parking lot of Circus Circus and cut the engine. “If I hadn’t summoned my fire, I would have never met you. I have to believe we’re together for a reason.”
“You’re the only place I fit.” Our gazes locked, and instinctively we leaned toward each other. “We should probably get out of the car.”
“You’re right.” Blade laughed, pulling back and opening the door. We walked as far away from the parked cars as possible. He took my hands in his and brushed his lips against mine. A whoosh of flame followed the movement. “I don’t want to live without this feeling.”
“Neither do I.” Our bodies melted together, the taste of his kiss dripping down the back of my throat. Fire licked our skin, rising toward the sky as Blade pulled me into his body.
This time, I wasn’t afraid. There was a good man buried under that rage, and I needed to help him battle his demons. It was worth whatever we needed to battle to bring that man back. The very same thing could be said about me, and I realized being with Blade was the only way I’d learn to conquer the things that threatened to destroy me. Neither of us could do it alone.
Chapter Sixteen
Peace reclaimed Theater Macabre. My footsteps echoed as we raced toward the stage, my clothes again burned away when we kissed. This time I was unprepared. Blade followed me, laughing as we trotted naked through the dark theater.
“Maybe some of those tights would look cute on you,” I teased as we headed to grab him something from the costume department to wear home.
“Doesn’t Cash keep a change of clothes near the stage?” Blade was so close I could still feel the heat radiating from his body. “He’s the only one that dresses halfway normal for the show.”
“Maybe, if you’re into leather pants.” I stopped in front of the stage, images of Cash’s performance flickered in front of me as if it was still happening. Blade slung his arm low across my back, watching the ghosts with me. I turned to him, tracing my fingers down his bare chest.
“I can still hear her screaming. I can smell her blood.” It burned my nostrils. I’d heard memories my whole life, but the smells had never stuck with me before.
“She’s at peace now.” Blade’s words were soft against my lips. “That’s what she wanted. Peace.”
He picked me up and sat me on the edge of the stage. I didn’t have a chance to ask him how he knew that before he kissed me. This was the one place I could be at peace. With the inevitable. My rehearsed, scheduled, fireproof world. A piece of which shattered tonight with that woman’s death. Her screams faded, replaced by the rhythm of Blade’s lips moving against mine, his hands all over my body.
My bare, sooty legs straddled his torso, and I leaned back on the stage. Blade followed me, climbing up with me his knee so close to the top of my thighs. His body was so ready for mine, licked by a blanket of fire. The flames tangled in his hair, everything orange and yellow exce
pt for his eyes, the hottest part of the blaze. Blue. I reached out to him, brushing my finger against his stomach, then brought it to my lips, sucking down the flame. Together, we were an inferno.
Even in the fire, Blade’s tongue burned my skin. Rough and sure, the opposite of what I was accustomed to with Rainey. Nothing about Blade was predictable or safe, and that’s what made me want him more. I pulled him against my body, and cried out as his teeth closed on my nipple.
“Fuck, this is insane.” Blade’s words warped in the heat. “I’ve never wanted anyone like I want you.”
“I’m yours.” I didn’t know if he could hear me or not. Flame dripped from his face on to my stomach. All we had to do was touch, and reason melted away. All our disagreements and the things that scared the hell out of me about him, were gone. He understood my darkness. “You’re the only reason I’m here.”
His fingers slipped inside my core. My body bucked, drawing him to the spot that made my heart stop beating. I crumbled when he brought his mouth down to the tight knot, the center of the flames. It only stoked the fire. My climax crested, but Blade didn’t stop. Everything around us exploded, and I opened my eyes to see the entire stage engulfed. I had no idea if the building could handle these sort of pyrotechnics, and I didn’t care.
Let it burn.
I pulled Blade’s hair, I needed to see his face. He couldn’t keep his mouth off me. Our lips tangled immediately. The hunger I had for him was painful, even as I tasted myself on his tongue.
I’d never ignited for this long. The flames were out of both of our control. Neither of us could rein it in. The desire overruled all reason. There was no way we’d figure out how to dominate the physical reaction our touch created.
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