Ares's cell phone vibrated. "It's a club-issued number."
"Vampires," Cavin said as Ares stepped away.
Jude exhaled. "Not the way we know them, but close enough, and we're the food source. We don't need to hunt them."
He thought of Katt, dead on the floor, tiny arachnids scurrying away from him. Of the shifters who'd been slain over the past weeks, their killers leaving no scent trail as they attacked closer and closer to the Jungle. Of Lily, who was a guaranteed key to the Kings' inner sanctum.
Lily.
"Jude." Ares's tone was dark and full of steel. Both Jude and Cavin turned. Ares punched speaker and turned the phone toward them. "Alexa, speak."
At first, the only sounds from the phone were the thump of music and panicked breathing. Then Alexa sobbed, "I'm sorry. I should have told you sooner."
Ares rumbled a warning. Alexa heaved a breath, and the rest burst out in a string of words that ran together. "Lily was bitten. She left-I think she wanted to protect you. I didn't know how to stop her so I let her go, and then I tried to find you, but-"
"Fuck us," Cavin bit out, cutting her off. "We don't need to hunt them because they're coming back to us."
Jude barely heard over his lion's bone-jarring roar. It reverberated off the brick and steel of empty buildings. He didn't even try to hold onto control as his lion tore through its cage, cracking bars like they were as flimsy as bones. And then it did crack bones. The beast tore him apart, reshaped him, but as he leapt for the edge of the roof, something collided with his side and knocked him back.
Jude, Ares and Cavin rolled across the roof, snarling and snapping their fangs at each other. Rage fueled him but anguish made him blind and human grief cleaved through the fury like lightning through a storm.
He came back to himself, shuddering, pinned under the weight of Cavin's lion, Ares nowhere to be seen.
Ares's going after her. Cavin's voice pushed into Jude's head. Control yourself. If he finds her alive, she will need a thinking man, not a rabid beast.
Cavin backed off, only to toss Jude down the elevator shaft.
20
Every step felt like pulling through mud or fighting a magnetic field. It wanted her to go back to the Jungle, but the thinking part of her, the feeling part that still recalled how her emotions stirred for Jude, that part still ruled. For how long, she wasn't sure.
Muscles quivering, Lily had to stop at a corner. Afraid to look back, she clutched a dark lamppost and stared at her moonlit hands.
Traceries of black branched beneath her pale skin. The spiders' poison. Had Katt looked like this? Had she seen his hands? No, he'd worn gloves. She closed her eyes to see if she could conjure a visual of his face but only generated impressions of puffy mottled fury.
And lust. Dark, sickening lust.
It was good that she hadn't waited to leave. Katt had stalked her for weeks so he must have held onto some semblance of his own mind for most of that timeframe, but he hadn't spent his days buffeted by the pheromones and energy that rolled off the people in the Jungle. In just the short time she'd spent inside, she'd already begun feeling the twist of erotic hunger.
It stirred inside her, making her brain do odd things, filling her with bits of memory that delivered pulses of wetness to her core. The images were so vivid, it almost felt like she was reliving them. Desire would have brought her to her knees, but for one thing-the flashes weren't slices of her with David. Whatever was at work inside her had gotten its hooks into the sensation center of her brain but her mind couldn't filter pleasure from pain, good from bad. It couldn't distinguish between the physical and the emotional, and that was the only thing that saved her.
The poison didn't know her wants.
And it wouldn't.
Forcing her shoulders back and her hands lax, she lurched away from the lamp post and threw herself down another narrow street. There was no way she could walk out of the industrial district, but maybe she could get herself good and lost, so she wouldn't be able to find her way back.
As she turned the corner, a sound split the night, one meant to instill its target with instinctual, ancestral fear.
Lily feared, alright, but the terror that vibrated through her bones was for the roaring beast. Jude had discovered her missing, he would come after her, and he would take her back.
And then the poison coursing through her would destroy him.
As the primal sound shook the vacant factory buildings, a huge, hulking shadow peeled away from the roof of the building on her right. It soared over her head and landed silently in front of her. The bulky shape wheeled around. Her insides froze.
"No," she moaned. Jerking backward, she stumbled over her own feet and fell against the side of the building.