The human was poisoned.
I stared at him, horrified.
In the next second, he fell to the floor dead. Someone had been controlling him, keeping him alive until someone took a taste.
No, I corrected myself as I could still taste his blood on my lips, not just someone. Me. They’d found a man they knew I would find attractive and made sure he was in my path.
Moving to the wall, and keeping it to my back, I stared at the melee. There had to be someone in here who hated me or wanted me dead. The blood had been made with killing me in mind, I just knew it. It would be my luck. And they kept the human alive for me.
Were they still here?
I stuck to the edge of the room, my vampire senses as acute as I could force them—with all the drunken blood in my body. I was glad I hadn’t thrown myself into the revelries. I’d be dead if I had. Moving quickly into the mostly empty dining room again, I put my ass in a chair and my back against the wall.
Poisoned human. They were trying to kill me.
Who were they? Who would try to kill a candidate when they were still in the trials? More than one of us had failed and died, or failed and been sent away, so it wasn’t as if the possibility of me dying wasn’t a factor already.
I wanted to enjoy this day.
I wanted to win my own personal challenge—and now it had all been tainted.
“Where the hell did she go?”
Somehow, I knew the whispered question just on the other side of the wall was about me.
“I don’t know! She slipped away. I expected her to go toward the door, and instead, she disappeared.”
Did I know these voices?
“We have to find her. She has to die.”
“I fucking know that, asshole! I don’t know where she went. She spat the blood back out, and now she knows we’re here. Come on. Let’s check the rooms outside the celebration. Fuck, why didn’t that work?”
I heard their footsteps as they started to walk away, and I stood to follow. But with the way my hair was styled, there would be no mistaking me for anyone else. I pulled the wig off and grabbed a human close by, stripping her cloak off and shoving the mass of hair into her hands.
Putting her in Thrall for just a moment, I had the woman put the wig on as I pulled the cloak on and swished away after the footsteps. I could see the two people who had been talking moving quickly away from me, sweeping and searching the crowd. Lifting the side of my shift, I pulled out the short sword I carried when I was leaving the stronghold.
The two figures, weaving through the oblivious crowds, met up with a third and fourth person.
One snapped, “Where is she?”
The woman, who had originally been looking for me, turned around and scanned the crowd, glancing right over me because I was wearing the black cloak and had lost the hairdo. I stifled my gasp and turned to watch from the corner of my eye.
Hortensia. I knew her. She was the candidate prospect one step below me. If I had said no to the trials, then she would have been the candidate. She was a horrible hag, no matter how beautiful she appeared.
I never considered the other potential candidates would want to kill me. But it made sense. Kill me off, and they moved up to a candidate. They’d be closer to being the queen.
Hortensia, though? She was just pathetic.
I glanced again and caught a flash of another pale face in another cloak.
It was her daughter. The nasty child named after the goddess of wisdom. Athena.
Well, well. Her daughter wasn’t so pathetic. She was ruthless and intelligent.
This was double bad.
Even if I won the throne, Hortensia would never stop trying to win. She was going to try to kill me. Either I could walk away and hide in my room, or I could take care of my business right here, right now.
This was a show of my own strength.
Someone had to die for this transgression. Going after Athena seemed wrong because she might just be her mother’s pawn in this. So I had to go after her mother, then.
The four offenders were on the move again.
Athena veered in a different direction with one hooded figure.
Hortensia stayed close to the other in a cloak.
I moved closer to hear over the music what they were saying.
“Your daughter fucked this up.”
“Shut up, Umar. She’s nothing without me, and you know that. You sent her off to control the human, and you didn’t tell me. I would have insisted one of us keep an eye on her. She is still young, no matter how smart she is.”
“You think she’ll do whatever you tell her, Tensia?”
“Yes, she will. She’s my creation, and she knows it. She doesn’t care for the crown, but she understands I do. All I have to do is kill that twat and mate with Nial.” Her head moved again, scanning the room for my flowers and hair. She gave a pouty stomp of her foot. “Where the hell did that bitch go?”
Umar snorted. “You’ll never control Niallan. You know that. He will string you up by your toes and drain the blood from your groin so you can drown in it as it fills your nostrils.”
Her face twisted. “Must you be so gross?”
“I’m a vampire, you stupid cunt. Lest you forget, I regularly rip throats for pleasure.”
“Hunting.” She shivered in revulsion. “Oh, there! There she is!”
The two of them marched into the parlor where there were a lot more vertical bodies around to hide my smaller stature. I saw the hair and flowers moving happily through the crowd, stopping to say hello to people, and bobbing on.
Hortensia and Umar were watching and closing in on my wig and flowers. They were careful and stuck to the darkest shadows. They got very close before they made their move to grab the woman wearing my hair.
Umar wrapped an arm around the waist of the woman and pulled her back into the dark. I could still see the flash of steel, a dagger at her throat. He hissed, “Hello, Gwynnore.”
The poor woman was startled and terrified, and I made my move.
I wrapped my arm around Hortensia’s shoulder. “Why, hello, Tensia. How are you?”
I poked the sword into her back, delight spreading through my blood as she gasped in shock.
Umar spun, dragging the woman around with him. He was clearly stunned.
I grinned at him. “Did you really think I would be that vulnerable after tasting poisoned blood and watching the man die on the dance floor?”
“You bitch,” Hortensia ground out.
“Me? You sent a poisoned human into the Blood Rite. How many vampires are now dead because they tasted him before the poison was fully bloomed, huh? You don’t deserve the crown you covet, and you sure as hell haven’t earned it.”
“Let her go,” Umar demanded. “I’ll kill this little human bitch.”
“You mistake me for my friend.” I snorted. “I don’t make pets of humans.”
He drew the knife across her neck, and she dropped to the floor, gurgling her last breath through her gouged throat. I stared at him standing there, licking the knife as he smirked. Umar asked candidly, “And you’re not bothered by that?”
“Not even remotely.” I wasn’t sugary sweet and shit.
He pulled out a gun and pointed it at me. “How about this?”
I twitched an eyebrow. “I don’t know… How about this?”
I drove the long knife up into Hortensia’s back, up through her heart, and out through her breastbone with a shattering crack. Umar pulled the trigger when the knife poked out of her chest, but I merely moved Hortensia’s limp body into the trajectory, and the bullet lodged in her brain.
I proceeded at vampire speed, yanking the knife out, letting her nearly lifeless body fall to the ground. I spun and whirled the blade up at an angle at Umar. I sliced clean through his neck before he even released his finger from the trigger. His head just sat there on his shoulders, his permanent expression in death one of surprise.
I grinned and nudged his head off his body, watching as it fell and rolled away from me, stopping with dead eyes staring at me.
Grabbing Hortensia’s body, I lifted it up at an angle and sliced her head clean off in an easy move, and kicked it over to rest next to Umar’s—side-by-side, their lifeless eyes gazed up at me.
Failures. The both of them.
Athena and the other companion stood mere feet away, their mouths agape.
The companion lifted his hands as if he were going to move against me.
I whipped the bloody knife up. “Try it. The aesthetic would be even better with a third head staring dead at the ceiling.”
The room erupted in applause. The humans watching had thought it was all a show for their entertainment, so I whipped around and bowed to them, accepting the praise for something they didn’t even understand. As I turned to leave again, I found Lord Otto and Cato standing in the shadows, three body lengths away, their expressions void of any emotion.
Apparently, they had been spying.
And they had let me handle it.
I threw the knife on the floor in front of them. “Clean up on aisle ten.”
Someone’s muscled arm wrapped around my waist from behind, lifting me off my feet.
Then I was yanked away.