My vision telescoped down to a narrow image, like looking through a straw. If I went out, I was dead. Beast took me over. Undulated my lower body. Held my upper torso unmoving to avoid ripping out my throat.
I shoved the silver cross into her cheek. Her wail began, low, deep, and full of torture. She rolled away, her fangs tearing out. I sucked in a breath of precious air. My blood rolled from my wounds in rivulets and splashed on the mirrors. I had a glimpse of burned face, my blood on her fangs. I pulled my legs under me. Curled my injured arm into my chest, fingers against my bleeding jugular. I recognized the two scarlet-clad vamps from the aborted confrontation in the hallway and remembered my worry from earlier. Another tag team? I didn't have the breath to laugh.
In the mirror I met the third vamp's eyes. The unknown. She stood over me, where I crouched on the floor. Cold power flowed from her like icy air from a glacier. Red hair, curly and wild, fanned out around her. Resting on her collarbones was a gold torque etched with Celtic symbols, and a gold cuff shaped like a snake climbed one upper arm. Her dress was cerulean blue shot with gold threads, toga-like, knotted on one shoulder, leaving the other bare. The bare shoulder was splattered with my blood like a tattoo of my death. She looked like some ancient and feral goddess. I was pretty sure her blue eyes were not quite sane.
For a fractured second she stared at my blood running down my throat as hunger blazed into her eyes, vicious and wild. Her lips pulled back. She launched, fangs and three-inch claws striking at me.
I reversed the stake in my left hand. Pushed up from the floor with my one good leg. Levering power into my shoulder, arm, stake.
She drove herself onto it. The wood pierced just below the torque, driving in three inches before she noted it. Her scream added to the others, so high-pitched it was like an emergency beacon, decibels strong.
An arm caught mine before I could alter the angle, driving for her heart. Icy flesh yanked me back, out of the small room, away from the keening vampires. Into the dark hallway. Whirled me around, against a cold, hard body.
I looked up into Leo Pellissier's eyes. Power crackled the air around us. Beast went silent, withdrawing her claws from me, and taking with her all the strength she had lent.
He was fully vamped out, pupils black in bloody red sclera, fangs snapped into killing position, his fingernails knives. His gaze was on my throat where my blood ran fast from the torn punctures. He growled. My death leaped into his eyes. Knowing there wasn't time, I curled my fingers into my hair for my remaining stake. But he lifted his stare away, to the woman vamp in the blue dress instead.
"Adrianna," he said, his voice silky and smooth in contrast to the snarl and violence on his face. "You trespass on what is scent-marked as mine. You and your scions attack a guest present at another's invitation. You force a blood meal. You reach across clan alliances and sow discord, a discord that is reported to me by my blood-servant instead of brought to me in a formal challenge for power."
I remembered Bruiser disappearing into the crowd only moments before my attack. Leo had arrived then, and Bruiser had told him of the conspiracy. I was sure of it. Not that it mattered. I couldn't shift in Leo's arms. And I was bleeding to death.
Leo's heart beat once, the sound startling against my ear. He leaned to Adrianna. And he smiled, fangs fully exposed and fierce. "Do you seek to challenge me for master of this city? Or is it time for you to seek the light?"
She hissed with fury. "I am not an old rogue," she said, the words accented and strange.
"Perhaps not, but you whisper discord. It is said that your blood-master seeks to form an alliance and break his oath of blood to me. Do you follow him into disgrace?"
"I am not without honor," she said, her lips pulling back to show her fangs. Which I was pretty sure was not an answer to Leo's question.
I pressed a fist against my neck wound. My knuckles skidded in my blood. I whimpered. Leo heard the faint mewling and stilled for a long moment, his body unmoving as a marble gravestone. When he took a breath, the movement of his ribs against mine was alien and foreign, as if that gravestone decided to breathe. He was scenting me the way a predator scent-searched prey. The faintest tremor quivered through him.
He blew out and swiveled his head between the two burned vamps now cowering in fear. He whispered, his words suffused with power, dark and demanding, "Lanah and Hope. Did your clan master sanction this action?" The two vamps looked at each other and then quickly to Adrianna, who faced him, her back to the sink. "Do not seek your sire for your answers," Leo said, his voice snapping like a whip. Their eyes shot back to him.