Bullet Page 0,77

this it will be . . .”

“Do it!”

I wasn’t the only one that screamed it; Micah and Richard echoed me. We all valued our control above almost everything, but in this moment we were out of control. It was just a matter of what we lost. I wanted to sink fangs and claws into that soft, breathing form. It was as if the power had turned on itself and become about death instead of life.

I smelled flowers, jasmine. Oh, God. But it wasn’t her or not her alone, and not her voice that echoed through my head. It was a male voice that I’d never heard before. “Feed and I will feast,” and then he laughed, a manic, insane sound.

I heard Jean-Claude think it—“The Lover of Death, God help us all”—and I knew in the fast-forward way that he could communicate with his servants that the Lover of Death, Morte d’Amour, fed on death the way that Belle fed on lust. He was the creator of the vampires that rotted, but were the hardest to kill of all. He would feed on the energy of every life we took. He was the ultimate carrion crow, a psychic vulture.

Jean-Claude took that need to stab and tear and bite, to taste raw flesh and have fresh blood gush in our mouths and over our bodies, and turned it to the only other hunger we had. One moment I was kneeling there with the feel of him behind me. I knew where everyone was and what we were doing, and then the ardeur hit the energy we’d raised. Hit it and exploded all that power out into the room.

I had a moment to hear the Lover of Death wail, “No, I cannot feed on that.” I smelled jasmine and disappointment, because the Mother of All Darkness could only feed on what her host could feed on. Belle had escaped somehow and no one else could feed on the feast we were about to give them.

I had a moment of fierce happiness about that, and then there was nothing but hands and bodies and things to do with teeth that didn’t kill, but would leave a mark.

18

I DREAMED. I knew it was a dream, but I also knew I wasn’t alone in the dream. I walked through a building I’d never been in, turning on lights, but just behind me each room went dark again. I couldn’t turn the lights on fast enough and in the last room where I turned on the light, there was a moment of brightness and then darkness came.

I woke, pulse in my throat and the amulet around my neck glowing softly. The glow faded, but I knew it had been her. The Mother of All Darkness had hunted me in my dream. She wasn’t strong enough to talk to me without another vampire’s body or powers to help her. Alone she was just that shiver that makes you walk faster at night. You don’t know why you do it, but some part of you remembers that the dark is never really empty.

As my pulse slowed, and the glow faded, I saw and felt where I was, and my pulse went right back up into my throat. There was a weight across my shoulders and something across my lower legs and I was staring into Wicked’s face from inches away. What I could see of him seemed to be nude, and the only reason I couldn’t see below the waist was that there was a woman collapsed face down across him. Her long yellow hair hid just how nude he might be, but she was nude.

I raised my head on the white carpet, knowing we were still in the living room of the Circus. Raising my head showed me that the drapes that made up this side of the “walls” had been torn down. There were more bodies in the twisted drapes, arms and legs, hair, a face that I recognized as one of the female vampires who worked at Danse Macabre. She’d been in the coffin room last night getting ready to bed down for the day, which meant that the ardeur had spread outside this room. Shit.

I was almost afraid to rise up more. Almost afraid to find out whose arm was across my shoulders, because I could feel it was probably male and the line of body touching mine seemed to be nude, just like I was. Fuck. The weight across my lower legs was someone