Myrial clearly wasn’t interested in my touching reunion with my tormenter. “I told you the whelp would be near Hell’s gate, Fae. Yet even with that foreknowledge, you were unable to capture her without my assistance. How incredibly tiresome.”
I stared between them, trying to get enough brain cells firing to understand what the hell I was seeing. Caspian and Myrial were... working together?
What the what?
“Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” I said faintly. “Sorry, but this situation was already plenty fucked up without the cut-rate Bond villain and the Wicked Witch of the West being in bed together.”
Caspian’s flat green gaze landed on me with shallow, reptilian loathing. It was the same expression I imagined a deadly rattlesnake would wear right before it struck at something that was pissing it off.
“Enough prattle,” he said. “Men—kill that creature. Slowly.”
It took me a precious half-second to realize that I was the creature in question. Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought my adrenal gland was capable of pumping out any more adrenaline than it had already dumped on me when Myrial appeared and snatched me away from Rans. Turns out, I was wrong.
Several of the Fae-controlled cops cracked their knuckles menacingly and started toward me, some reaching for batons and pulling them out, ready for use. I started to back away, my eyes darting around in search of any sort of escape route as the hot wind from the approaching storm blew spirals of hair into my eyes. I could try to run, but Myrial could just teleport to wherever I was and grab me again. My eyes flew back to the cops, frantically seeking a way out of the situation. An instant later, something clicked.
Men. Oh, my god. They were all men.
Without stopping to think too closely about it, I ripped off my threadbare t-shirt and threw it aside, my breasts bouncing at the sudden movement.
“See anything you like, boys?” I snarled through bared teeth, and started striding toward the line of burly cops. Several of them hesitated, their eyes dropping to my chest. Curls of instinctive human lust wafted toward me like invisible tendrils.
Quick as a flash, I grabbed those tendrils and pulled.
The men I was drawing animus from stumbled toward me like iron filings being pulled by a magnet. I gritted my teeth and yanked harder, even when clammy hands touched me—pawing and grabbing. Part of me—the human part—started gibbering a silent refrain of oh god oh god oh god as I was groped by five horny men fueled by lust and the desire for violence. Or was it six? The part of me that wasn’t human licked its lips and reached for the new tendrils floating toward me, as more of the cops grew excited by the sight of their fellows touching me.
And... one of those tendrils wasn’t human. My eyes flew to Caspian—his form barely visible through the shifting gaps between heavy bodies. Our eyes locked for an instant, and I snatched at that prickly Fae energy so I could drag as much of it into me as possible—damn the consequences.
I’d fed passively from crowds on several occasions now, but I’d never actively pulled animus from more than one person at a time. It was a hell of a lot easier than feeding selectively, as it turned out. There was no fiddly filtering of one individual’s energy from another. No careful restraint to avoid taking too much. Nope—this was brutal. Feral. Eat or be eaten.
I hated the feel of their hands on me with every fiber of my being... and I loved the feeling of their strength siphoning into me with equal ferocity.
I loved it even more when the first one’s eyes rolled back. He slumped to the ground, convulsing. A second cop followed, and a third. Somewhere off to the side, I heard Myrial’s delighted laughter in response to the growing chaos. As more of the humans fell, I became aware of the two that weren’t giving me anything to feed from.
Gay, I thought distantly, or asexual, maybe.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that both of them had their guns drawn and pointed at me, stupid expressions of shock plastered on their faces. They couldn’t fire without hitting their fellows, but as soon as the last cop surrounding me fell, they’d have a clear shot. That problem was solved—temporarily, at least—when one of the ones pawing me hooked a leg behind my ankle and dropped me on the ground. Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. I actually landed on a pile of shuddering male flesh, not the ground.
Fresh panic tried to claw at me as the cop shoved my legs apart. I stuffed it down and kept pulling from him, until his movements became sluggish and uncoordinated. Then, I wriggled a hand to his belt and unsnapped his holster, pulling the heavy weight of his gun free. When his body started spasming like the others, I managed to get a knee between us and roll him to one side.
Myrial was still laughing as though all of this was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. I fumbled with the unfamiliar safety on the gun and cocked it, grateful now that Rans had forced me to learn the basics of firearms, even though I hadn’t wanted to at the time. Now, it felt like a switch inside my brain had been flipped. With pictures of Edward’s dismembered body and Caspian’s sneering face as I was tortured swirling together inside my head, I’d happily kill every one of these motherfuckers and worry about my conscience later.
“You black-hearted demon bitch!” Caspian was yelling. “Don’t just stand there—do something!”
The Fae looked like he was battling himself to keep from coming closer to me. One hand was clenching his chest as though he could physically keep any more of his animus from leaking out. To be fair, I was finding it harder to draw on his energy than the humans. And he must have a lot of animus to
