And I was counting on still having a pulse when this was all said and done.

As for Peyton, I no longer cared what the Tribunal wanted. He would die tonight.

“You think you can kill me?” I said with a defiant sneer. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Insolent girl!” The humor was fading with every syllable. I was getting to him, and that’s what I had been counting on.

Peyton grabbed a fistful of my hair and used it to pull me up with him as he rose to a standing position. After lying on the ground for so long it took me a moment to get my footing, and that’s when he went for my throat. I made a decision then, and I could only hope it was the right one.

Instead of escaping Peyton, I pulled the gun from the back of my pants and pointed it in the opposite direction. As the vampire’s fangs punctured my artery, I started with a full clip and emptied half of it into Marcus Sullivan’s head. I pivoted my eyes in time to see him fall dead at my mother’s feet, surprise still etched on his face.

“Guess you’re not the queen now, bitch.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

The moment Marcus’s death registered with my mother it felt like a dozen things happened at once. Too much was taking place simultaneously for my brain to process most of it, and my vision had begun to swirl.

I turned the gun on my mother but before I could shoot, Peyton’s fangs sank deeper into my neck, undeterred by the previous gunfire. As his teeth dove farther he must have severed a nerve because my whole arm went limp and my hand fell open against my will. The gun clattered to the floor, leaving me unarmed and helpless. Peyton’s hands splayed across my back, and he used my sagging frame to his advantage, dipping me backwards in a way that would have looked romantic if he hadn’t been sucking my blood.

With my eyes rolling back I could see the empty antechamber and wondered, for the first time, what had happened to the unconscious guards. The mountainous corpse of the head guard was still slumped on the floor, but none of the others remained. I didn’t want to dwell too long on what might become of werewolves who’d failed to protect their alpha and his vampire partner. Before I had time to further ponder their absence, my mother let out a loud, anguished scream and hurled herself onto Peyton and me.

In her short flight across the room her hands transformed. The fingers disjointed, twisting and shifting with sickening crunch-pop noises I could hear over her shrieks. Her nails elongated and became claws. It was with these deformed appendages that she attempted to lash out at me from on top of Peyton’s back. Those monstrous hands, I knew with perfect clarity, had been the same ones she had buried into my neck that night at the Chameleon.

The weight of the two of them brought us all crashing to the ground. Peyton was locked on to me in a feeding frenzy, like a shark maddened by the scent of blood, only he was attached to me at the neck, drawing out my life one swallow at a time.

My mother was shrieking and growling, slashing at whatever she could reach. Peyton’s back was being torn to bloody ribbons, but he no longer seemed aware of anything except for feeding.

Pinpoints of light appeared in my vision, and they danced and shimmied all across the room. One of my mother’s swipes hit me across the face, and her claws opened the skin of my cheek, but I was in shock from having lost too much blood. It felt like something wet and breezy that stung my face.

“You killed him! You killed him! You killed him!” Her words were jumbled together, repeated over and over until they no longer had any meaning, and she was just making impotent, pained noises.

I opened my mouth to make a quip back at her, but a bubbling, gurgling sound came from the base of my throat instead. If I couldn’t be a smartass, chances were good I didn’t have much time left. Mind you, if I could still think about being a smartass, perhaps I wasn’t a lost cause just yet.

As my vision started to taper out and my hearing became more tinny, I swore I heard someone shout my name.

“Secret!” It sounded like Lucas.

This had to be a sure sign time was running out. Hallucinations couldn’t mean anything good.

“Secret!” This time louder, closer, more adamant. It seemed too real to ignore, but with a three-hundred-year-old vampire latched onto my neck, I didn’t have the luxury of turning to look.

Rolling my eyes to the side, I imagined I could see a large group of people crowd into the room.

“Huhhhh.” I was trying to say hi in a last-ditch attempt at my lunatic form of humor, but it came out as a sort of death rattle. “Oh,” I added, when I realized the words were not what I wanted them to be.

Snarling echoed through the room, but more masculine than the sounds my mother had been making.

“Get the wolf.” This voice was so familiar my pulse quickened with relief, which only caused Peyton to clamp down harder.

“Hol…” I stopped trying to talk and gurgled a scream as Peyton buried his face into the open wound of my neck, and his teeth grazed bone.

Holden moved faster than the werewolves and was already grabbing for Mercy before Dominick, Desmond and Lucas had crossed the antechamber. Lucas was still growling as they surged forward and fell onto the writhing mass of pain on top of me. The four of them had all swept in so quickly I was only half willing to accept they were real.

With Desmond and Lucas so close I expected I’d be able to taste them, but I couldn’t and it chilled me.

Lucas edged past Holden, ripped my mother off the pile and hurled her at the far wall, where she collapsed onto the floor in a heap, not moving. Desmond and Holden were trying to pry Peyton off me without success. He had bitten me down to the bone and wasn’t showing any signs of letting up.

I locked eyes with Desmond, and in that moment the whole tableau froze. The look on his face was so much more tormented than it had been the night at the club. His expression made me think I was as good as dead, because no one looked at you like that if there was hope. In spite of the fact we were staring right at each other, he was giving up. He looked defeated, crushed and totally hopeless. It broke something inside me.

“No.” It was the one word I was capable of saying no matter how bad things got. My brow furrowed at him, and I tried to shake my head, but I couldn’t for obvious reasons. “No.” My voice may have been small, but the look in my eyes made my point for me.

Desmond released the breath he’d been holding and turned back towards Holden and Peyton. Holden was using all of his strength to drag Peyton off, and I could feel the skin of my neck tearing looser and separating from bone as they struggled. If they continued on this course, my neck would be ripped wide open by the time they succeeded in pulling him away.

“You mustn’t yank him like that.” A female voice, clipped, with an unidentifiable accent. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “He’s locked on to her. If you continue, you will only succeed in killing your half-breed friend.”

Lucas recoiled, but Holden was less compliant.

“Warden.” This was said in a warning tone that carried commanding weight. She was addressing Holden by his title, his low rank, which implied she was superior to him. “You will release the rogue.”

Holden hesitated, but he let go of Peyton. It was only then Peyton seemed to become aware there was anyone aside from me in the room with him. He unhinged his jaw and raised his head from my neck to look around. His face was smeared and dripping with my blood.

“Ew,” I said, and the room spun, making me wonder how everyone managed to stay standing. I tried to raise my hand to cover my throat but found none of my limbs would do what I wanted them to. Paralyzed by blood loss, all I could do was lay there and watch the theater of the absurd unfold around me.

Someone new came to stand over me. She had gold-toned skin and thick, straw-blonde hair, with eyes so green I thought she was part cat. The eyes were what gave her away, too even and calm to be genuinely human. Ingrid. Sig’s daytime human servant.

She gave me an appraising look, appeared to be satisfied with my place among the living for the time being and turned to whoever else she had with her. Snapping her fingers twice, she indicated the bewildered vampire on top of me.

“Alexandre Peyton, you are to be requisitioned by the vampire Tribunal and held for investigation and punishment based on the charge of abandoning the laws of the council and attempting to expose the secrets of vampire society to the general public. Do you acknowledge and accept this decision?”

He snarled at her. I’d never seen a human address a vampire in such a cavalier and condescending manner. Ingrid obviously believed she had no reason to fear Alexandre Peyton and was making sure he knew it.

“I take your lack of response as acceptance. There will be hell to pay should the Tribunal’s pet not survive. Sig is especially fond of the half-breed. He won’t like it if she dies.” She cocked her head to the side. The expression on her face was that of a Harvard scholar speaking to an insolent puppy who had just peed on her rug.

From behind her a collection of vampire wardens descended on us. They jostled me against the hard concrete floor as they grabbed Peyton and pulled him off me. He began to thrash like a hooked fish when he realized Ingrid wasn’t just speaking out her ass.

“Take him to the Tribunal,” she said, her voice monotone and bored. When they had removed him from the room, she looked at me again, then cast her gaze to the three werewolves and the remaining warden, Holden.

“Someone may want to give her some blood. She’s not looking well. I suspect she wouldn’t be too picky, given her situation.” What she meant was that any healthy vampire would have rejected werewolf blood outright. As smart as Ingrid was she didn’t know anything about me other than what the council did, that I was half-vampire. Her dismissive title of half-breed was more accurate than even she was aware.

“Warden,” she said to Holden, “you will come with me.”

“No.”

The room shifted and I felt my whole body getting heavier. Everything was quieter and people’s voices were taking on the slow, drowsy quality of a broken tape recorder.