Pas (2 page)

“You look like you just raided a blood bank,” Shaniqua said. She was too busy eyeballing the blood bags other vampires were loading into coolers to care how the Beta looked.

Niamh would have cared. She would have dropped everything to help primp.

Deirdre leaned in close to the reflective side of a refrigerator for a few quick adjustments. Shaniqua was right. The night on a rainy rooftop had done no favors for her hair or clothes, and she wanted to look artfully ruffled, not sloppy.

Then January was there, and the lights were on Deirdre.

“What do you want to say this time?” January asked. “I’m rolling, so start whenever you’re ready.”

Deirdre was ready for the question. She’d been practicing with notecards all day when she should have been sleeping.

“It’s in a vampire’s nature to drink human blood. There are no substitutes, artificial or animal, that are nutritionally complete. More importantly, nothing satisfies a vampire’s instincts nearly as well. Vampires are hunters. They need to be able to hunt. They need to be able to eat.” Hadn’t she written something paralleling vampire instincts to shifter instincts? She couldn’t remember now. She skipped ahead, trying not to blink in the brightness of the lights. “Once Everton Stark is Alpha, all gaeans will be allowed to follow their instincts—including vampires.”

She paused to take a breath, but in that heartbeat of silence, January turned off the camera.

The reporter was done filming.

Deirdre tried to conceal her surprise. “I had more to say.”

“No, that was good, you’re great.” January took the light off of the top of her camera.

Was it really that good? She’d barely said anything at all.

The vampires were watching Deirdre. They weren’t a large enough faction to be worthy of courting—they would barely have any impact on the election. But she needed Lucifer’s people to provide support to her personally. She had promised them this blood bank raid, and coverage from January Lazar, to help legitimize their problems.

For the moment, they were happy to be emptying the refrigerators of blood bags, and distracted trying to guard the guards. They hadn’t noticed that Deirdre’s statement had been cut short.

She checked the time. It was still early—at least for vampires. “We can probably hit another blood bank tonight. Get more blood and more footage.”

“I don’t think so.” January yawned and stuffed the light into her padded case.

“What do you mean, you don’t think so?” Deirdre tried not to sound irritated by January’s resistance. Stark had always managed to be civil to the reporter regardless of her behavior, so he obviously thought it was important to treat January well.

“Following you around doesn't generate good ratings anymore.” January shuffled around for the batteries, inventorying her equipment. “It’s not interesting when nothing goes wrong. I’m not going to say it would be better if a few of your people got staked, but…well, it would be easier to justify giving you a prime time slot.”

“You said you’d give us coverage up until the election,” Deirdre said.

“And the election’s almost here.” She tucked the padded case under her arm. “Give yourself the day off, huh? Kick back, take it easy, don’t worry about the polls. Nothing exciting is going to happen between now and whenever people start entering the voting booths.”

Deirdre’s irritation got the better of her. She grabbed January’s equipment case. “But we’re still polling several points behind Rylie Gresham. You
have
to keep documenting this.”

January’s eyes sparked with anger. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Someone shouted from the other room.

“Stop!”

And that word was punctuated by a shrill scream.

A human scream.

Deirdre bolted to the doorway.

Chaos rocked the blood bank’s waiting room, difficult to distinguish with the lights turned off. Deirdre could only see one person crouched on top of another, holding the lower body by the shoulders.

She didn’t have to look behind her to know that January had already unpacked her camera and started recording again, faster than should have been possible. The reporter was good. She could switch from cool disinterest to recording within instants, like she had a sixth sense for drama.

Deirdre approached the people struggling on the floor. “Someone tell me what’s going on!”

Lucifer blocked her path. “One of the guards tried to cast this at my vamps while our backs were turned.” He lifted a spellpage marked with a jagged rune. Clearly something that was intended to cause significant damage—probably something fiery, which would have been instantly fatal to vampires. “My boy took her down.”

Now Deirdre could see them. She could see the witch’s legs thrashing as a vampire buried his fangs deep into her jugular.

It almost looked like an intimate position, the way that they embraced each other. They could have been making love.

But the witch was gurgling wetly. She was dying.

January Lazar’s spotlight turned on them. Where the light touched, vivid color flooded the scene. The blood became vibrant crimson rather than black. The woman’s pale, panicked face was pink.

Fear surged within Deirdre. She didn’t dare show it. She only allowed herself to show anger. “I said no casualties!”

Lucifer grabbed her when she attempted to pass him, fingers digging into her sleeve. “You also said that we should be allowed to follow our instincts. That’s a big part of Stark’s platform. He wants us to be able to do exactly this.”

January was filming Deirdre again. The spotlight was so bright that Deirdre could barely make out the reporter’s excited expression behind the camera.

This would be great for ratings.

Worse, Deirdre
had
said that vampires should be able to follow their instincts. But that was political bluster, whereas her insistence that there be no casualties was her preference.

There was no time to hesitate. She couldn’t stand around debating whether it was better to allow the vampire to feed, and demonstrate the platform that she was promoting, or punish him for disobeying her. Vampires were easy to kill. She could deliver swift justice before anyone thought to stop her.

If Stark had been there, he would have known what to do, and he would have done it swiftly.

The witch’s eyes rolled around to focus on Deirdre. She pleaded silently for help over the vampire’s shoulder.

January was filming.

They were still ten points behind Rylie in the polls.

Deirdre was numb from her lips to her toes as she faced the camera. January had her framed so that the attack on the floor illustrating her words would be visible behind her. “Gaeans should be able to obey their instincts.” It felt like Stark’s voice coming out of her body. “When Everton Stark is Alpha, the laws will change. And all gaeans will be free.”

“Good,” January muttered. “So good.”

The vampire dropped the guard. She fell to the floor, boneless and limp.

Others among the murder swarmed. There was a lot of blood in a single person, more than enough to give everybody a taste.

Deirdre stepped back to give the reporter room to film it.

“This is going to be great for the polls,” Lucifer said, standing back from the others. A vampire lord was better than his instincts. He wouldn’t join the frenzy. But that was easy for him; he had been snacking on Niamh, which meant he wasn’t starving as badly as his followers. “If this doesn’t close the gap, nothing will.”

“Great,” Deirdre said.

It didn’t sound like her voice at all.

Through the clustered bodies of the vampires, Deirdre saw the witch guard’s eyes sliding closed.

The early hours of morning brought velvety silence upon New York’s streets.

By that time, Deirdre was already home—at least, what currently passed for home at Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise—accompanied by a dozen satiated vampires and coolers filled with blood bags.

There would be a party to celebrate the night’s victory. They loved parties, those vampires. They loved to crawl under clouds of lethe and vibrating bass to forget how badly they were starving. They loved to share blood while clinging to one another, bodies twisted with rapture.

They loved to pretend they weren’t dead.

Normally, Deirdre helped entertain them. It was good for their alliance. It was what Stark would have done.

With the dead witch’s eyes in her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to linger.

She went upstairs.

Just a couple of months earlier, Deirdre had been invited to Everton Stark’s room at the asylum for the first time. She had been surprised to find that he’d lived in the same squalor that the rest of the pack did—the same kind of tiny, water-stained, concrete box that his Omega had slept in.

At the time, Deirdre had attributed his choice of living environment to a sense of equality with the people who obeyed him. Psychopathic or not, she had believed that Stark was truly a man of the people.

Now she knew that it had nothing to do with equality.

She knew so many more things than she used to.

Deirdre had followed Stark’s lead when choosing one of Chadwick Hawfinch’s apartments for herself. It was as sparse as those that the vampires occupied throughout the rest of the building, and positioned directly above the lobby celebration. The floor was thin. She could hear them carousing in the way that only vampires flush with blood would.

At other times, the vampires would be quiet, sullen, low-energy, and miserable. Always on the brink of starvation, never capable of dying because they had already passed on from the lives they used to know. But tonight, they had fresh blood. Some of them had even sipped it from the veins of the guard before she died. A rare pleasure.

They were happy.

Deirdre could hear their happiness below her as she bolted the door to her apartment.

When she flicked on the bedside lamp, cockroaches scattered.

She’d been itchy ever since taking that apartment. Deirdre wasn’t sure if it was something she imagined because of the cockroach infestation or if there were bedbugs. She healed lesions too quickly to tell if she were really being chewed upon.

Chances were good she imagined the itchy sensations.

She wasn’t imagining the constant skittering of insect legs within the walls or the
drip-drip-drip
of leaking rain.

The mattress whined as she sat. The brown stains on the exposed, flattened pillow top could have been perceived as coffee spills if she’d been feeling optimistic. She hadn’t even kicked off her boots before climbing up. What was one more stain among a thousand others?

Deirdre clamped the intake bracelet on her wrist.

The bite of metal teeth didn’t hurt anymore. The sting must have been followed by healing fever, but she didn’t feel that either.

Vampires thudded downstairs while she took a cube of lethe from a wooden box on her bedside table. The faint glow of blue turned her latte-brown skin a sickly gray. When she rolled the cube between the pad of her forefinger and thumb, the lethe within swirled silvery-slick, like oil on the surface of the ocean tossed by a hurricane.

A sound that wasn’t celebration caught her ear. She nudged the broken blinds up an inch, peering down at the street through a crack between the boards nailed on the other side.

Movement swirled over the dark street, punctuated by the flashlights on cell phones, some lighters, a flashlight or two. Some kind of citizen patrol. Wouldn’t be long before that front of the storm smashed into an OPA patrol and turned into violence.

Didn’t matter to Deirdre. The election was coming. There’d be a new Alpha by the time the sun rose again twice, and there’d be nothing worth rioting over anymore.

That was the theory, anyway.

She let the blinds fall back into place. Closed her fist around the cube of lethe.

Someone screamed downstairs.

Probably Niamh.

The vampires laughed.

They’d been enjoying the harpy as their toy ever since Stark left them. Taking turns drinking her blood. Sharing it by the milliliter.

And Deirdre let them.

Gage wouldn’t have let them, but he wasn’t there. She’d killed him. He’d forced her to do it. And then Stark had left too, and Deirdre was alone.

She sank against the headboard, shutting her eyes.

Gods, she hurt all over. It wasn’t even cold in her apartment, not like it was outside—she’d found a couple of space heaters and kept them on high all the time—but Deirdre felt miserable.

She slipped the cube into the intake bracelet. The drug heated in her veins.

The emptiness didn’t leave, but it numbed. It didn’t hurt as much. It was a veil between her and the high-rise, the vampires six feet deep, the sense that she was becoming Stark breath by breath.

Yeah. Deirdre knew a lot of new things about Stark these days.

Too many things.

Election day arrived without fanfare.

Midnight found Deirdre and Geoff near the polling station in Chelsea. She’d posted teams of her allies around the city, stretching them as thin as she dared, trying to provide protection against the attacks to come.