And... oh.
Now I could feel the unfamiliar trails of animus flowing into me. I paused, trying to keep everything straight inside my magical core. Don’t feed from Rans. Do feed from this crowd of strangers... but don’t start actively pulling from them and accidentally take too much.
It was a lot to keep track of.
I glanced around, trying to look both imperious and untouchable—playing for time. Len and Tristan had wandered over at some point. That probably should have been weird. I expect it would have been, if my inner succubus hadn’t already come out to play. Apparently, she had no problem with an audience.
Even so, it helped considerably that neither Tristan nor Len had any sexual interest in me. I could sense their energy flowing in our direction, but it wasn’t for me. It was for Rans. And, hey? Who could blame them? Besides, the energy flowing back and forth between the two of them was far stronger and more vibrant than what was wafting our way.
D’aww.
Okay, I could totally do this. After quickly double-checking that I hadn’t started pulling from Rans while my attention was split, I went back to my soft-core sadism routine. More wax splattered along the defined valleys along his six-pack. He made a production of yelping and struggling, drawing a fresh burst of excitement from both halves of the S&M crowd.
The sadists wanted to be in my place. The masochists wanted me to be doing this to them. All of them wanted, and I was the focus of that desire. Even though I wasn’t the one wearing hot wax on my bare skin, I could feel warmth growing low in my belly. I tried not to dwell on the fact that I was feeding from these people. As long as I didn’t hurt them, I told myself firmly, what I was doing wasn’t wrong or evil.
It was simple survival.
Rans had to drink blood, or he’d starve. I had to drink animus, or I’d go back to my miserable part-breed life of perpetual near-starvation. If I was careful—if I didn’t get greedy and take too much—all that would happen to these people was that they’d feel a bit more wrung out than usual after a night at the local kink club.
I glanced around again. Oh, good—the creepy bikers had made an appearance. All of them were staring right at me, and one in particular was giving off an unusually powerful wave of lust. Something about that wave reminded me of the time I’d instinctively tried to pull animus from Caspian in self-defense. Not that this biker guy was Fae—he definitely wasn’t. No... it was the desire for violence twining with his sexual desire that was familiar.
I suppressed a shiver, but I let his energy flow into me nonetheless. The violence couldn’t touch me—not like this. All my magic allowed in was the lust.
I replaced the spent candle with a fresh one. Rans groaned and jerked hard against the restraints as wax pooled in his navel and overflowed. When hot dribbles landed on first one pierced nipple and then the other, he twisted as though trying to get away before falling back, limp and panting with feigned reaction. The excitement from the audience peaked, and then began to ebb as I returned the candle to the table and snuffed it.
Now I felt jittery and overfilled with energy. Energy that wasn’t Rans’... and I hadn’t even needed to fuck a stranger to get it. It wasn’t a bad feeling, really. Just unusual. I took a moment to collect myself, breathing deeply.
When I turned away from the table, the strange woman from earlier was standing over Rans, stroking a proprietary hand through the cooling wax on his chest.
TEN
“HANDS OFF THE MERCHANDISE.” Rans’ voice was flat and cold. He swiped the blindfold off in a single, swift movement by rubbing the side of his face against his bicep, and craned up to catch the woman with an unimpressed stare.
I was at his side in an instant, squaring off with the intruder. “Back off,” I snapped. “Whoever you are, you’re not invited to this party.”
The woman lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender. She looked at me with a guileless gaze that didn’t gel with the arrogance of her bearing. “My apologies, dear,” she said in a sweet tone that made me clench my jaw. “I need to speak with you once you’re done here. I know I shouldn’t touch, but this one is so very pretty, all trussed up like this. I’m sure you of all people can understand the impulse.”
“And I’m sure you can understand the words back off,” I shot back. “So maybe you’d like to, oh, I don’t know—do that now?”
On some level, I was aware that I was leaning over Rans’ chest, resembling nothing so much as a dog snarling over a bone. Rans was watching our back-and-forth like someone viewing an upside-down tennis match, and I had to admire his aplomb.
“Perhaps a conversation somewhere else, in more congenial—not to mention private—circumstances?” he suggested.
A disturbance in the murmuring crowd around us caught my peripheral vision. One of the staff members was pushing her way toward us, calling, “Ma’am! I need you to step away from those people if you aren’t part of the scene—”
Relieved by the imminent arrival of backup, I watched the staffer elbow her way through the half-dozen scary biker dudes. All of her attention was focused on our little drama, and a dart of unease pierced me. Almost casually, the biker creep whose animus had been so tainted with violence reached out and grabbed her by the hair, yanking her head back. She shrieked—the sound cut off by a gurgle as he slashed a knife across her throat. Blood spurted, and her body fell to the floor, convulsing.
“Well?” the man demanded, looking around at his
