Bite Club

Myrnin was still hanging on to her. “Hey!” she said, and shook her arm to try to throw him off. “Let go already! I’m fine!”

He was frowning and trying to look everywhere at once. “I think we should leave,” he said. “I can easily break a hole in the bricks over there. Yes, we should go now. See, your boy is fine. Everything’s fine. Except Glory, obviously—that’s definitely not fine—but honestly, do any of us care? I certainly don’t.”

“Let go!”

“No,” Myrnin said. “You’re my responsibility. And this is dangerous. I don’t know where Bishop is, and until we find him, I don’t want you on your own.”

Claire threw down the black bag she was holding, reached in, and came out with a thin, silver-plated knife. “You know what’s dangerous?” she asked. “Me. If you don’t let go.”

He sighed, rolled his eyes, and released her. She snatched up the bag and ran for the cage, bouncing off panicking strangers and a few people she actually knew who’d come to bet on her boyfriend dying in a cage—God, she wanted to hit them—and then made it to the steps that led up to the big, square cage. The fight cage.

With Shane.

Shane looked over as she pounded up the risers and flew like a bird into his arms. It felt like the best thing she’d ever done, putting her arms around him, feeling his warm, damp skin pressed against her.

He let out a long, wordless breath and collapsed against her, hugging her like the world was ending, like he never wanted to let her go again. “I’m a fool,” he said. “And an asshole. You ought to run as far away from me as you can. I am so sorry.”

“If I run, you run with me,” she said. “Are you all right?”

He held up his right hand. It looked red and a little swollen. “Broken bone,” he said. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

She took his hand in both of hers, cradling it, and put it gent ly to her cheek. He was staring at her with a hungry expression, one that seemed to her to be more about hope than anything else.

“Just like that,” he said. “Just like that, you’re going to let it go. All the things I did. What I said. God, Claire…”

“Uh, no, idiot,” Claire said. “You’re going to have to work for forgiveness. But this…this you get for free. Because I love you.”

He smiled a little and then he kissed her, and for a few long, sweet, breathless seconds, it was all okay again.

And then Claire heard the sirens.

“The hell?” Shane said, because it wasn’t just a siren. It was a chorus of them, wailing over each other in waves. Every siren in town, it sounded like, all heading toward them.

Claire felt a sick surge of understanding, which became even more clear when Myrnin came up the stairs to join them inside the cage, took her by the upper arm, and said, “And now we are going. No arguments. Amelie and Oliver are coming, and they’re bringing as much overwhelming force as is available to them. If you want to maintain your body, soul, and freedom, stop dwithering and come. No one in this room will be safe once they arrive. They’re very much in a shoot-first, ask-questions-never mood.”

“Dwithering?” Claire repeated blankly. “What is—?”

“Must we argue word choice? Now?”

“Nope,” Shane said. “We’re with you. And we’re going.”

And they would have been, except that as Myrnin turned and headed for the open iron gate, someone else came up the steps and blocked the opening.

Bishop. Impossibly, he looked even younger than he had on the video, like he was aging in reverse. There was fresh blood on his mouth and smeared on the collar of his shirt. His eyes were ancient and vicious and pretty much crazy, Claire thought, as he smiled with his fangs out and said, “Let them come. My daughter thought she could starve me, wall me up, make an example of me. I’ll make such an example of this roomful of people—no, this entire town—that no one will ever say its name again without shuddering. The nightmare is coming now. Wake up and enjoy it.”

Myrnin stared at Bishop in outright horror and backed up fast. He let go of Claire. In fact, he put her and Shane in the way.

“What’s the matter, my old friend?” Bishop asked. He calmly reached back, grabbed the door, and slammed it closed behind him with a rattle and boom of metal. Then he bent the frame so that it wouldn’t open—more effective than a lock. “No clever plans? No silly games? Because you know I haven’t forgotten what you did when you betrayed me. You know I’ll take you apart one piece at a time…fingers and toes first, then working my way in. And your little humans here, they’re only a moment’s work. By the time Amelie and her court reach us, I’ll be drinking their blood out of your skull.”

“You could still run,” Claire said. She couldn’t believe she had enough strength to talk, but she did. She was scared, but not that scared. Somehow, after everything she’d seen, Bishop wasn’t the worst anymore. “You could break out of a wall and disappear in the confusion. You know if Amelie catches you, she’ll kill you.”

“Indeed, I think Oliver’s quite convinced her that making an example of me is bad strategy,” Bishop said. He paced side to side, but every turn closed the distance between them. “I expect she’ll execute me instantly. Or try. But I’m better at this than they are, either of them or all of them. I am the best killer who ever lived.”

“Yeah, you don’t seem too worried,” Shane said.

“I had a great deal of time to consider my place in this world, while she had me sealed up in that tiny, airless hell. Nothing to eat. Nothing to hear or feel or touch. Just endless, dark eternity. Do you know what I decided?”

Shane shook his head. Claire realized she was still holding the small, silver-coated knife, and now she nudged the black bag closer to Shane, who glanced down at it.

“I realized that if I can survive that, survive being starved down to bones, I can survive Amelie’s worst,” Bishop said. “I don’t need Vassily and Gloriana. I thought I needed an army to take this town, and they were making me one—humans like you, Shane, who’d take out vampires without flinching. But I don’t need them. Or you. Any of you.” His eyes flared blood red. “Except as fuel.”

Shane crouched down and reached inside the bag, pulling out a crossbow, but it wasn’t set. It would take seconds to cock and load, and Bishop wasn’t going to give it to them.

Bishop smashed the crossbow into splinters with one blow, and threw Shane headfirst into the bars.

Claire screamed, because it should have killed him…and probably would have, if he hadn’t been dosed up with that drugged sports drink Vassily had given the fighters. Instead, it only stu

Claire didn’t think. She threw herself at him, and when his strong, pale hands reached for her to rip her open, she slashed with the silver knife she held. She didn’t know what she cut off, but Bishop howled and backed away from her. Then he came for her.

Shane couldn’t get up, but he could roll, and he did, right in front of Bishop’s feet as he moved. Bishop fell, twisted, and grabbed Shane’s head in his mangled hands.

Claire tried to stop him, but couldn’t get close enough. She slashed with the knife and delayed him from snapping Shane’s neck, but it was useless; she couldn’t get to him, not without getting killed, too.

That was what Bishop wanted. To kill one of them while the other watched.

“Hey!” Eve shouted, just on the other side of the bars. She had something in her hand, something long and thin and sharp. “Heads up, CB!” It came flying at her, and Claire grabbed it.

It was a sword. One of those things Eve had used against Oliver. She’d gotten a touch on him with it.

This one had a point, not a button, and the edges were sharp on all three sides of the triangular blade.