Instantly, I remembered the first time I saw Adrianna. Red hair, curly and wild, had fanned out around her, flowing to her waist. Resting on her collarbones had been the gold torque etched with Celtic symbols, and the gold snake cuff climbed one upper arm. Her dress was cerulean blue shot with gold threads, knotted toga-like on one shoulder, leaving the other bare. The bare shoulder had been splattered with my blood like a tattoo of my death. She had looked then like some ancient and feral goddess, her blue eyes not quite sane.
This time she was in a small, white, featureless room, one with a smooth, sloped floor, a drain in the center, and steel mesh cages, like small jail cells. It was a scion lair. Her cage was made of woven steel strands, making it pliable but very strong, with a stainless-steel, tray-like bottom. The edges of the tray were cupped to hold an inch of mixed blood congealing in the bottom, and Adrianna’s unbreathing, lifeless body lay coated in the blood like something a chef was about to barbecue. The hole the silver stake had made in her head was still gaping. Gray matter seeped into the blood from the head wound.
“Wait here, please,” I asked Juwan.
“Whatever the Enforcer wants,” he said, succeeding in sounding insulting, while letting me know without saying so that he was checking out my butt. I really needed to take Juwan down a peg. Or three.
Soon, I thought, and recognized that it was Beast thinking, not me.
Hey, Beast. Missed you, I thought back at her.
She chuffed. Good blood smell.
The door shushed shut behind us, leaving Eli and me alone with the brainless fanghead.
“Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and James Wan, move over,” Eli said.
“Who?” I asked as I moved into the room, taking in the sights, smells, and the uncanny silence. This room was not on our maps, and it had been soundproofed. Which was scary all on its own. It was small for a scion lair—the place vamps kept their insane scions until they came through the devoveo, found some control over the hunger that made them little more than ravening animals, and were ready to reenter society and life with humans. What I called the curing process, but not aloud in front of vamps. This room had been constructed with six cages; all but Adrianna’s were empty, which was smart. The smell of all the blood in the steel pan might have driven young vamps into a frenzy.
“Three of the best horror movie directors alive today,” Eli said. “Alex is not gonna believe this. What—” He stopped and moved closer to get a better view of the body. “What is this place?”
“Modern version of a scion lair, but not a typical use of one. This is a blood burial done on the cheap. I smell three vamps’ blood, Leo’s, Bethany’s, and Grégoire’s. All powerful, two of them relatively sane, and all willing to sacrifice some blood to the cause, apparently.”
“Why doesn’t it stink?” Eli asked. “It should be rotting, like vamp blood always does.”
I remembered the real blood burial I had seen before, when Katie, Leo’s heir, had been buried in the blood of all the vamp clans. It had taken quite a while for every vamp in New Orleans to make an offering, but even after the last one donated, the blood still smelled fresh. Not rotting. And vamp blood was supposed to go to rot instantly.
Good blood smell, Beast had thought. And she was right. Which was odd.
“I don’t know. But we keep this to ourselves. Let’s go.” I started for the door.
“Zzzzaaaaa . . .”
I turned and met the insane blue eyes of the naked vampire lying in blood. Adrianna took a breath, and when she blew it out, she blew blood bubbles. Gross. She was alive. Undead. Whatever. It creeped me out. I shoved down on my shock and walked to the cage. With one hand, I lifted and dropped the padlock. It clanged a deep echoing bong in the empty room. The padlock was huge; the shank that went through the cage’s steel rings was bigger around than my thumb. Which was probably smart. Vamps in blood burial came back from being temporarily true-dead extra strong, and more wack-a-doodle than they had been before.
“Zzzzaaaane.”
“I’m here, Adrianna. Next time I see you, I’m taking your head. Fair warning. You’ve survived one time too many.”
“Zzzjjjaaane.”
“Let’s go,” I said, heading for the door. “We’ve got a Son of Darkness to find.”
“Zzzooosaaaace,” she said.
I stopped at that, the door to the hallway a foot from my nose. “What?” And then it clicked and I turned around. “What about Joses?”
“Heeee . . . Heeee . . . Ccccommme.”
“Groovy. Then I won’t have to hunt him down, will I?” I made a fist and banged on the door. It opened on the first hit, and I nearly hit Juwan in the head with the second bang.
The look Juwan gave me and my fisted hand was insolent and insulting and a put-down to my gender, my race, and my . . . everything. Standing in the narrow hallway, I grinned at him, showing blunt human teeth. Beast rose in me, the gold glow reflected back at me from his dark eyes. His expression didn’t change, but his scent did, warning me.
Juwan attacked.
I blocked the first three punches, expecting him to move in and knock/knee/lever me to the floor—a typical guy move to get the female on the ground where they think she deserves to be—so the fourth punch was unexpected and landed, hard, on my jaw, knocking my head back and making me bite my tongue. The fifth landed in my gut. I actually gave him an oof of grunting reward before I countered with a couple of punches of my own, moving in close.
The next moves were nearly Beast-fast, punching fists, stabbing fingers, bodies maneuvering for leverage to get the other guy down. Juwan danced back and kicked up, the kick a feint, hiding a hand-stabbing thrust to my throat. I dodged the thrust, grabbed his leg, and whipped it high. His own leverage and torqueing force turned him. But Juwan had planned on that, and his other foot came around. Powered by me as I forced up his leg.
The whirling kick landed solidly against my temple, in a move eerily like the sparring between Daniel and Eli only days prior, and I went down with him. Landing under him, limbs tangled, seeing stars. Beast growled low in my throat and swiped my brain with her claws, clearing my muscle memory, if not my eyesight. Still half-blind, deducing his body position from what I could feel, I kicked. Striking with the heel of my foot. Because I wasn’t above hitting a guy where it hurt.
The kick landed. Juwan inhaled with a squeak, curled into a tight V, and started making sounds like a wounded bird, gack, gack, gack. And cupping his genitals. I rolled to my feet and stood over him, my eyesight coming back in patches, like digital pixels.