The reborn male—the one with skin that spoke of the savannah—tore out the human woman’s heart, sinking his fangs into her neck at almost the same instant to tear open her jugular. She was still standing when Adrian reached over to rip out the male’s throat, wrenching the vampire’s body apart with his hands until the unfortunate male was nothing but a pile of discarded meat. The dead human female lay beside the lumps of flesh, steam rising from the viscera as Adrian—hesitating for a second, as if tempted to lick up the blood that had soaked into his skin—took out a handkerchief and began to wipe off the mess.
Moving past the butchered couple as if nothing had happened, Lijuan came to stand in front of Elena. “That mortal heart, some would say, is a weakness that will steal the gift Raphael has given you.”
“Better a mortal heart,” Elena said in a quiet voice, “than a heart that feels nothing at all.”
A smile, almost girlish, and all the more terrible for it. “Well said, Elena. Well said.” A single clap of her hands, an unspoken command. “To mark this occasion, this meeting between the ancient and the barely born, I’d like to present you with a remembrance—a gift from the old to the new, one so special, so unique, that I have kept it hidden even from my own court.”
The pain caused by Lijuan’s last gift was still a burn on her soul, but Elena steeled her spine, held her place, knowing this was a test she had to pass—or she’d be discounted for the rest of her existence as nothing but Raphael’s once-mortal toy.
“Phillip.” A glance at the Chinese vampire with that heartbreakingly beautiful face.
Phillip melted away into the crowd.
“It will be but a moment.” Lijuan turned her attention to Raphael. “How is Keir? I haven’t seen him in centuries.”
It was an attempt at small talk but it fell oddly flat, as if Lijuan was putting on a mask that didn’t quite fit. Elena heard Raphael respond, but her eyes were locked on the shadows where Phillip had disappeared, her heart pounding one sluggish beat at a time as a single drop of sweat rolled down her back.
The evil whispered nearer with every beat that passed, until she could almost taste it on her tongue.
Dirt, that sweet rot that accompanied all of the reborn.
A spice for which she had no name, a hint of ginger, warm golden sunlight.
She knew what the horror would be before Phillip reappeared with a handsome mahogany-haired man who’d been blessed with eyes of darkest brown, eyes that invited a woman into temptation. He’d been a movie star before being Made. Young girls had put posters of him on their bedroom walls, giggled as they whispered his name.
His eyes locked with hers.
“Come here, little hunter. Taste.”
The words were a husky whisper inside her head, a thousand screams rolled into one. She knew Lijuan was speaking to her, but all she heard was that singsong voice that had haunted her for almost two decades.
“Run, run, run.” A giggling parody of Ari’s dying attempt to help Elena. “She won’t run. She likes it, you see.”
Elena felt the nightmare spiraling out beneath her, a bottomless pit from which she might never escape. It sucked at her, tinged with the laughter in the monster’s eyes, the nauseating joy in his expression—as if they were bound, as if he had a claim on her. She felt her legs begin to tremble, her heart jerk as she found herself back on that floor, scrabbling back on bloody tiles with hands that kept slipping, kept holding her prisoner. It was wet, cold, but Ari’s eyes—
A rush of rain in her head, untainted and strong, a scent that thundered of the sea, of the wind. Elena, I stand with you.
It was a sudden, sharp realization flavored with the relentless strength of the tide—she wasn’t alone in that room. Not anymore. Buoyed by that truth, she stepped back from the abyss, walked into the present, and saw the repugnance that was Slater Patalis standing beside Lijuan.
The vee of his shirt revealed smooth, unblemished skin, free of the ugly scar created by the Y incision cut into his flesh during the autopsy performed by a Guild pathologist. Elena had watched the video over and over, until she’d convinced herself that he was dead. It had been too little justice for what he’d stolen from her, but it had been justice. Lijuan had no right to erase that, no right to use Belle’s and Ari’s deaths as part of a game that would hold Lijuan’s interest for no more than a flicker of time.
Her entire body filled with anger, clean and bright. It sang with a kind of purity she’d never before known. The monster was smiling while her sisters lay dead in their graves, while her mother’s body hung forever in the wall of her mind, creating a shadow she’d never forget.