I was going back for my fourth girl when a scuffle began, and one of the men shouted, “Dammit, girl. Let go of me!”
The sound of his open hand striking her cheek didn’t even stop the musicians. But the sound of her boot cracking his chin did.
“You dare to strike your master?”
In answer, she kicked him again. The room went so quiet that I heard the clatter of his tooth hitting the floor. Vale rushed past me, carrying two girls under his arms like sacks of flour. I fetched the last drooping daimon victim through the curtain as the girls stepped away from their partners and drew their weapons.
“Magician! What is the meaning of this?” a familiar voice called, and I followed the duke’s gaze to a balcony up above, where an acid-yellow daimon stood in a red-and-white-striped suit, his taloned hands curled around the balustrade. Without a word, Monsieur Charmant turned and fled.
“It means your little club’s over, monsieur le duc,” the nearest girl spat. The duke grabbed her hair and yanked it, and she shoved a letter opener deep into his stomach. With that thrust, the fight was on.
The daimon girls had originally taken on the matching skin tones of the dancing partners they’d replaced. But as they whipped out their weapons and howled their war cries, they burst into vibrant, angry hues of red and black and fierce tiger stripes. Vale rushed past me and waded into the fray, the ornate silver Wolverine claw sweeping before him and striking home in the back of a double-wide tuxedo. Of course, he was here, my first interviewer, the gatekeeper. Monsieur Philippe. The blades slipped into the black fabric, right under his ribs where the kidneys nestled in fat, smooth as butter. Philippe fell to his knees hard enough to make the floorboards creak. I should have been fighting, should have taken up a weapon, but I couldn’t stop watching Vale. His fragility terrified me, but the man was damned beautiful in a fight.
Vale ripped out the claw and wiped the blood spatter from his cheek before kicking Philippe over. The overfed gentleman sobbed on the floor, flailing like a turtle on its back.
“You’re, what, Philippe—the curator? You choose the girls?”
“I meant no harm. I didn’t know—”
“You were dancing with Limone. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
Philippe covered his eyes with sweaty fists. “Please, monsieur. I beg you. Whatever you wish is yours.”
“There’s only one thing you have that I want.”
“Women? Money? Riches?”
Vale snorted, his humor gone completely. “Revenge.”
I turned away before I saw the final slash of the claw, but I couldn’t plug my ears against Monsieur Philippe’s gurgles and the wet sound of gizzards hitting the wood. Then I smelled the blood and remembered my best weapon. Vale’s hand brushed over my cheek as he went to help Lexie, who was struggling with two men. His knuckles had painted me with a slash of red, and I licked it greedily from my lips.
“They owe you blood, bébé,” he said, voice husky. “Take your due.”
I nodded and turned away from what was left of Philippe. He was cooling quickly, so I scented the air for something strong that needed to be destroyed. My hands were already curled into claws before I found my prey, and I was across the dance floor, leaping over bodies and slipping in puddles of blood, aiming for his throat.
The gentleman was familiar to me, one of dozens of nameless faces from the boxes of Paradis. His fine, smooth hands were wrapped around Leola’s slender neck, his thumbs boring into her windpipe as her eyes rolled back. I slashed his throat open with my claws and began drinking before he’d even let her loose. Leola shook herself and stood.
“Merci,” she mumbled, before wading in to help the next struggling girl.
Something tugged my leggings while I drank, and I spun around, hissing. It was the prince, as I’d never seen him before. Dirty, deflated, bruised, covered in blood, and sniveling in a puddle of snot, his colorful suit stained and slashed to show pasty white skin underneath.
“Demitasse, my beloved. Help me. Heal me.”
I shook him off and wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist. Licking the blood from my chin, I tossed the man in my arms halfway across the room and stared at the prince as if he were an alien. An animal. A fluffy little bunny.
It was difficult remembering how to use words and talk around my fangs. “Heal you?”
He rubbed his face on my ankle, and I kicked him away. “Your blud. Make me what you are. We will rule together. You will be my queen.”
I remembered how to laugh then. Throwing my head back in a wild half-cackle, half-howl, I kneeled over him, noting the pulls in the silk of his silly jacket. A few sad worms of hair scraggled over the bald pate he’d hidden under his turban.