Both entrance grates came crashing down.
The crowd bellowed in anticipation. The stadium setup meant the view was good at any angle, despite the shoulder-to-shoulder attendance. Chains of iron and silver roped off the twenty-foot-wide pit. Silver for vampires and varcolai, iron for fae. Both for remnants if the mixed lineage creatures had unlucky blood.
The announcer continued as he walked around the outside of the ring. ‘Tonight in our headline fight, noble Malkolm fights fringe Ronan in a grudge match.’ He turned his attention from the audience to the men in the pit. ‘Combatants, are you ready?’
Mal nodded. Ronan shot both hands skyward and circled once, like he’d already won. Bloody fool.
‘Then let the battle begin!’ The announcer chopped his hand through the air.
Mal launched across the arena. A half second later, his shoulder was buried in Ronan’s stomach and he was plowing Ronan into the silver chains. The sizzle of skin announced contact.
Ronan shoved Mal away and tore free of the burning metal. He threw a punch, but Mal ducked, speedy with veins full of comarré power.
A wave of vertigo tilted the floor. Mal recovered in time to land a jaw-rattling hit that split Ronan’s lip. Blood trickled down his chin before the wound zipped closed.
‘First blood,’ the announcer sang out to the cheering crowd.
A honey-sweet fragrance filled Mal’s senses. The voices shrieked, amping the metallic screech up another hundred decibels. He flinched and froze at the sudden din.
‘You bleedin’ tool.’ Ronan threw a fist that connected with the side of Mal’s head.
The punch knocked him to the ground and opened a line of pain across his temple. The crowd noise morphed into a fog of sound that wrapped his head like a wet wool blanket and muffled the voices.
He started to roll to his feet as Ronan’s foot shot toward his ribs. ‘You’ll stay down, if you know what’s good for—’
Mal grabbed Ronan’s foot and kept rolling, flipping the fringe to the ground and bashing him face-first onto the concrete floor. Ronan lay still.
More blood scent flowed into the air. Sweet. Familiar. Very much like the smell of … of what? Mal’s head felt fuzzy and useless. Like his brain had been soaked in whiskey. Or worse.
A needle of clarity pricked through the muzziness. The blood Katsumi had forced him to drink had been tainted. With what, he didn’t know, but if not for Chrysabelle’s blood, he’d probably be Ronan’s punching bag right now.
Chrysabelle. Chrysabelle.
Mal stumbled to his knees. Everything wore a second shadowy image. Saliva pooled in his mouth with a sudden bout of nausea. Katsumi’s drugs were starting to win. He had to figure this out before he keeled over. Concentrating, he flipped Ronan onto his back. Blood gushed from the man’s busted nose and covered his forehead where the skin had broken. Head wounds always bled like crazy. Ronan moaned and lifted his head, his eyes fluttering open. Mal slugged him again, cracking his skull against the concrete a second time. Ronan stilled.
Mal swiped his knuckle through the blood on Ronan’s forehead and tasted it.
Recognition punched him in the gut. He fell back on his heels, staring at the smudge of red on his skin.
Ronan had comarré blood in his system. Real comarré blood, not the excrement Dominic passed off in his club. And there was only one real comarré in Paradise City. Mal licked his lips for a second taste, just to be sure. He’d been right the first time. He knew that blood, because he’d had some himself before coming to Seven.
Rage ignited within him, grain alcohol poured on a spark. The beast roared and Mal leaped onto Ronan. Without Fi, there was no one to help him control the snarling, desperate creature trying to break free. She’d kept the beast at bay for so long but now she was gone. Suddenly, Mal didn’t care that the beast raged wild. He opened himself to it, welcoming the assured destruction the beast would bring.
Because for whatever foul deed Ronan had enacted upon Chrysabelle to get her blood, he was about to die.
Chapter Five
With a set of sacres strapped to her back and an assortment of other blades hidden about her person, Chrysabelle approached the public entrance to Seven, having already decided to go past it and enter through a side door. The pair of varcolai wolf-shifters who guarded the club’s front entrance were still sore about Mal persuading them to let her in fully armed the last time. Beyond that, Seven was starting to get a reputation among humans as the place to go to see real live vampires – at least among those who believed in vampires, like the typical habitués of Puncture, the strictly human nightclub for those who wished they were vampires. That place was probably losing money since most of their clientele now hung out in front of Seven.
Humans were not always the smartest of species. Well, some of them weren’t anyway.
The idealized, romanticized, Hollywood vampire who was going to offer them life eternal was a myth. Vampires, fringe and noble alike, had two uses for humans: servants and food. Not always in that order. And while some fringe were more tolerant, that could soon change with the covenant gone. It wasn’t a coincidence that the city’s murder rate had already begun to rise.
She shook her head as she lingered at the opening to the alley leading to Seven’s main entrance. A Gothic-looking crowd of humans hovered as closely as the newly installed velvet ropes would allow. Well away from the main group, a few picketers carried antivampire signs. The wolf bouncers stared straight ahead as if the crowd didn’t exist, except for an occasional snarl when one got too close.
A car drove up from the
