I schooled my features. “Only a psychopath would keep track of something like that.”
“A psychopath is just an assassin without pay.” A slow smile spread across his lips. “You don’t want to admit what you really are? Fine. But don’t be surprised when that darkness inside you rises up and you’re forced to deal with it.”
“That’s the difference between you and me, Slade.” I set down my drink and rose with deliberate slowness. “I’m actually happy no one’s tried to kill me in months. It’s a nice change of pace. I’m done with that dark shit. I’m embracing the light now.”
He laughed out loud. “Sweetheart, you might like to pretend you’re a mage now, but you’re still half vampire. And we all know what happens to vampires who embrace the light.”
Our gazes locked. Sounds from the bar intruded into the tense silence between us. I was so intent on glaring at Slade that it took me a second to register what I was hearing. The music had cut off and had been replaced by screams. But they weren’t the shouts of a happy audience. They were the shrieks of terrified patrons. Slade heard them, too. One second he was by the desk and the next he ran past me to the large one-way mirror that looked down on the bar.
“What the—” he breathed. Curious, I joined him. By the time I reached the window, beings were running around like spooked animals.
In the center of the chaos, Tansy was screaming and covered in blood. Slade ran to the door and threw it open. I followed him onto the landing.
“Tansy?” he shouted.
The nymph looked up with wide, spooked eyes. “Someone killed my client!”
5
In the aftermath of Tansy’s shocking announcement, my stomach dropped as if someone had pitched it from the Empire State Building. My head started to shake from side to side, as if the movement could somehow reverse time and make her a liar. Marty was dead? No way.
Slade stared at her for a split second before leaping down the stairs. As he ran to her, he barked orders. “Giguhl, help Earl seal all the exits. No one leaves until I clear them. Once that’s done, call Michael Romulus and tell him to bring his pack down to help take statements from everyone. Got it?”
The demon jerked into action and took off across the bar. I stood numbly, unable to process anything or do much more than stare dumbly at the spot where Tansy sat. Slade turned and located Pussy Willow among the onlookers. “PW, take Tansy. Get her cleaned up.”
Pussy Willow came forward and wrapped a comforting arm around the nymph. “Come on, cherie. I got a special bottle of hooch in my dressing room. We’ll have a nip or two and fix you up right as rain.” Despite her upbeat tone, PW’s face had gone pale under all that makeup. As the pair passed, the changeling looked at me with real fear in her eyes.
“What can we do?” Adam asked. Thank the gods one of us was thinking clearly.
Slade’s jaw clenched as if trying to keep his temper in check. Knowing the vampire, underneath that calm but determined façade, he was simmering with anger that someone dare do something like this under his own roof. “Both of you come with me.”
Slade led us through the door at the back of the club and into a nondescript hallway. A clutch of nymphs huddled at the end, whispering to each other and crying pretty tears. The air hung heavy with the aftershocks of violence and the scent of blood. Too much blood.
He stopped outside a door halfway down and on the left. His solemn eyes met mine; our shared look held the weight of… too much knowledge. Judging from the strong odor of blood, there was no chance Tansy was mistaken about Marty’s murder. “Brace yourselves,” Slade said. “This is going to be messy.”
He twisted the knob and pushed. The portal swung inside slowly but the air, heavy with the stench of death, slammed into us like a sucker punch.
I swallowed hard. It was one thing to see a crime scene when the victim was a stranger. Easy to compartmentalize. But knowing that the victim this time was someone I’d known and liked made me pause at the threshold. Almost as if I knew that once I crossed into that room, life would never be the same.
I licked my suddenly dry lips. “Let’s get this over with.”
Marty’s body hung from hooks like a macabre mobile. Pinned like a bloody butterfly. Displayed like a gruesome objet d’art.
A single, surgical line ran from his Adam’s apple to his groin. Wounds ravaged his neck, his thighs. But his lips tilted up in a secret smile.
Whoever strung him over the bed hadn’t worried about the mess. The formerly white sheets looked like Rorschach ink blots made from pools of blood and entrails. The air stunk of sex and fear.
Oxygen was suddenly too heavy for my lungs. Cold sweat coated my chest. And my mind turned into a sadistic time machine, forcing me back to a night thirty years earlier.
The virgin corpses hang from hooks like grisly angels. The Dominae stand below, their moonbeam skin bared to our eager eyes. Blood rains down, coating their hands, their lips, their breasts.
I tried to blink away the memory. Wanted to dig it out with those hooks. But it wouldn’t budge.
“No,” Lavinia’s voice cracks through the temple. “Not her.” My dreams disintegrate, choke me. Wet cement hits my lungs. My cheeks burn with shame. But Lavinia’s smile is cold.
“Sabina?” Adam’s voice sounded far away. But it somehow managed to break through the haze of remembered pain. I swallowed hard. My eyes focused again and they found the carnage that met them a relief. The blood and the gore and the thumbprint of violence were preferable to the bitter memories of that night long ago. The night Lavinia stole the future I wanted and replaced it with the one she needed. The night that left me fractured. Gave me the wounds that never fully healed. The night she made me an assassin.
“Red?” Adam said, closer now.
I blinked. Confusion on his handsome face and worry. Worry and love I never saw in Lavinia’s cold mask.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
Adam watched me warily, as if he expected me to bolt. He placed a hand on my arm. The contact was my undoing. I saw his lips move but I couldn’t hear him anymore. The overpowering scent of blood, the nauseating reek of decay, the biting sting of those black memories suffocated me. I clawed at the collar of my coat. I needed fresh air. I needed space.
“I need to go.” I barely managed to force the words out over the rising tide of bile and shame. Adam didn’t try to stop me. Bless him.
I groped past Slade, past the nymphs clogging the hallway. Didn’t bother with manners. Just pushed through them like a drowning woman straining for the surface. Soon but not soon enough, I burst through the women’s restroom door. I slammed it closed and clicked the dead bolt.
The stalls and walls were painted industrial gray. Dingy white tiles looked like decayed teeth with plaque for grout. One of the faucets dripped methodically, like a counter ticking down the seconds to my nervous breakdown. I sucked in lungfuls of fetid air despite the scent of old mildew and wet cardboard and pine solvent. But what the restroom lacked in fresh oxygen it made up for with privacy.
Fluorescent bulbs overhead sputtered light like strobes, flashing in time with my heartbeat. The mirrors were little more than scraps of polished metal. Apparently, the clientele of Vein had little interest in using the mirrors as intended. Instead, they’d graffitied every inch of the surface with markers and lipstick. My mirror, for example, served as a canvas for a spurned lover who claimed that “Ben Charles is a fucking liar!” The last two words screamed across my face in harlot-red lipstick.
I turned on the tap and splashed water on my face. It stunk like rusty pipes, but it was as cold as a much-needed slap.
“Get it together, Sabina,” I said aloud to my reflection. But that face with the wide eyes. That pale visage with its lips pulled back in fear. That face wasn’t impressed by my bravado. That face knew things I hadn’t been able to admit to myself. Not yet.
I focused on getting my hitching breaths under control. On convincing my heart to stop trying to claw through my chest cavity. For a few moments, I hovered on the knife’s edge between sanity and hysteria. Then, thank the gods, I finally took my first painless breath. My neck muscles unclamped, leaving behind a dull ache in my jaw. I took another handful of water and rubbed my hands over my face. When I looked up again, the panic in my eyes had dulled. But the smoky gray shadows still lurked.
I released a long, slow breath. And with it, Lavinia’s ghost. But I knew the relief would be short-lived. Demons like Lavinia Kane never stayed exorcised.
The door handle shook. I swiveled, automatically crouching into a fighting stance.
“Sabina?” Adam’s muffled voice drifted through the door.
I blew out a breath. “One sec!” I used my shirt hem to wipe away the rest of the water. Checked my reflection one last time in the mirror. I glared at the strange chick staring back at me. “Suck it up.”
With that, I turned and went to the door. My hands shook as I flipped the bolt. The door whipped open with more force than necessary. It slammed against the gray wall like a gunshot. Adam flinched and narrowed his eyes at me. “Everything okay?” The question was hesitant, the kind one would use with a woman on the edge.
“Yep. All good.”
“What happened back there?” He jerked his head toward the door down the hall.
This was definitely not the time nor the place to have a heart-to-heart with him about how seeing Marty strung up like a virgin sacrifice had resurrected feelings I’d believed buried for good. Feelings of revenge and loss, guilt and victory, disappointment and pride about Lavinia’s death. One of the shittiest parts about mourning is that just when you think you’ve moved on, someone else dies and all that grief rises up, resurrecting all the pain and anger and remorse. But, like I said, not the time or the place. Hell, if I had my way, no time or place would ever be right to talk about it again.
“The smell got to me.” I shrugged and forced a self-deprecating laugh to hide the lie. “Guess I’m losing my edge.”