Wicked After Midnight(127)

Putting on a kind smile, I leaned over him until my lips brushed his ear. “No one owns me,” I whispered. “No one ever will.”

I bit down too hard, and it was over quickly. His blood tasted of far-off spices and too much wine. And I smelled something else, something familiar. Abandoning his pulsing jugular, I put my nose to his collar, his lapel, his lips.

He smelled of Cherie.

I jerked away before he was completely dead and surveyed the scene. Most of the men were down, and the girls were working in pairs now to dispatch the rest, calling Vale and his claw over to finish off the gents who struggled. There was no sympathy in my heart for these men, not from the predator or from the girl. It was bad enough that they came to the cabarets and bought their pleasures with oranges and francs and empty promises. It was more damning that they forced the girls to give up their tails and their magic, an intrinsic part of their lives that they would never see again. Knowing that the dead-eyed girls had been brought to this underground lair of debauchery and used—the men deserved even worse than what they’d gotten.

But there was more I needed to know, and so I hunted out the one who was still the most alive and undamaged. Unsurprisingly, it was Auguste, the slippery bastard. Three girls had him cornered, but he still had his tail, and it curved over his head like a scorpion’s stinger, pointing at each girl in turn as she approached.

“Save him for me,” I growled.

Auguste’s head snapped up, and he spit on the ground at my feet, his normally pleasant face twisted into a sneer and his once-indigo skin as yellow as Charmant’s. “You should have done as you were told, bloodsucker. This is on your head.”

His tail pointed at me, his hands balled in fists at his sides. My nose quivered, but my eyes didn’t budge from his. I had to keep him talking. “Yeah, I’m pretty proud of that. So how much did they pay you to torture your friends?”

He leered. “They paid me in pain, not coppers. Your petite amie Cherie can really scream.”

My talons bit into my palms, my fangs grinding for a taste of his throat. Daimons weren’t satisfying, and no Bludman in her right mind would crave one’s blood; it was the same way I felt about Brussels sprouts back home. But as Criminy had always told me but never encouraged me to discover for myself, the enemy’s blood was always the sweetest, and you didn’t notice the taste so much in the heat of battle. All I had to do was find a way past that tail.

Just before I completely lost it, Vale appeared behind Auguste, bloodstained claw in hand, and said, “I wonder how loud you can scream.”

With one swift slice, Auguste’s tail fell to the ground. Seeing his only weapon disabled, I went for his throat. The girls gasped as I ripped into the yellow flesh, and after a few rage-fueled sips, I sat back on my haunches and spit on the ground.

“Ugh. That taste is just . . . wrong.”

Vale held my shoulders and helped pull me back up to standing. “Bad news, bébé. He was the last one.”

I looked around the blood-spattered ballroom, inhaled deeply. He was right. They were all dead. I wiped the dregs of Auguste off my lips. “Merde.”

“But where is Cherie? Can you smell her?”

I shook my head and looked to Bea.

Mel was on the verge of tears, her arm wrapped around Bea’s shoulder. Bea was back to her usual blue, covered in gore and sporting a line of four Malediction Club pins on her jacket like hunting trophies. At least it was less grisly than ears or scalps on a string.

With a general’s surety, Bea pointed to a nondescript corner. Since the walls of the ballroom were draped in indigo velvet curtains and tapestries to ward off the cold that seeped through the stones, I had imagined it was simply one large room. But as she crossed the boards and twitched the curtain aside, I saw another door. The last one had been ceremonial, carved, ancient, morbidly beautiful. This one looked as if it had been designed by a master artificer. It was thick, riveted metal, with heavy reinforcements and a complicated lock that I was willing to bet even Vale couldn’t pick.

“Can we break it down?” Mel asked, and Bea shook her head and pointed back to the ballroom, signing something. “She says the door is new and heavier than the one she escaped from. But one of the men will have a key.”

Without a word, we spread out, each girl kneeling beside a dead gentleman to rifle through his pockets. It was eerily similar to what I’d been doing every night in the copper elephant. I checked Auguste, but he carried nothing that resembled a key. Probably just a lackey, even after all this time. I did find a fang knotted into a handkerchief, which I retied and tucked into my own pocket. Chirurgeons in Sang could do amazing things, but I didn’t know much about reconstructive dentistry.