LUCY
I can't feel myself.
My legs are weighted, as if tethered to blocks of lead, and my hands are feeble—jelly-like and completely useless at my sides.
Is this what Harlen calls being high? I wonder distantly, a dull pounding starting up behind my temples as Cole comes to a stop at the mouth of a damp, narrow alleyway just behind the club.
The space is cluttered with the skeletal remains of the night: overflowing trash bins, crates of empty glass bottles stacked high, and a heavy steel door that almost certainly leads back into the club's kitchens.
The sight of that door makes something in me loosen slightly. I tell myself I can always slip back inside to my friends when this is over.
Cole doesn't waste time. He presses me against the brick wall—not roughly enough to hurt, but with a firm weight that leaves no room for misinterpretation. Then he steps back, scanning me with a long, unhurried look.
I flush under that predatory gaze, even as my vision begins to swim, the edges of the world blurring into gray.
"How do you feel, Martha?"
My internal alarms trip all at once.
There is a particular emphasis on the name—a mocking lilt that tells me he has known all along how much I lied. His voice has shifted too, the casual human charm stripped away to reveal something underneath that is dangerous and quietly amused.
I try to push off the wall. My muscles refuse.
Is it the alcohol? The cigarette? I barely took three drags of the thing.
Cole steps back further, his head turning as he surveys the shadows around us.
Gauging our privacy?
A shudder of cold terror moves through me at what that might mean—and then he lets out a low, sharp whistle.
My fear multiplies a hundredfold.
The phantom's warning detonates across my hazy mind like a flare.
Don't go out for a week. It will do the trick.
The trick was supposed to be my safety. Keeping me out of sight of people like Cole. But he's human, isn't he?
What would a human want with a girl like me?
The answer arrives before I can finish the thought. Four more figures step out from the darkness—four males of varying heights, their silhouettes jagged against the distant glow of the streetlights.
Fear floods my mouth for the second time tonight, more bitter than the first.
I try to run. My body is a cage I no longer have the key to.
They begin to move around me, prowling, nostrils flaring as they circle with sneers pulling at their lips.
They are scenting the air, I realize. Like animals. Like predators who have cornered something small and are in no particular hurry.
"Who are you?" I manage. My voice sounds far away, like it belongs to someone else.
Cole and his companions don't bother to answer at first. I reach inward, grasping for any instinct still functioning beneath the fog. These aren't wolves—I can sense the absence of the lunar pull even without my own wolf, that particular frequency simply not present in their veins.
So what are these things that look human and smell human but move like beasts?
"Hunters," Cole answers finally.
Hunters? What was that? Another brand of supernaturals?
And why would they hunt me?
Cole stops directly in front of me, his hand rising to tilt my chin upward. His fingers are like ice against my skin—the same unnatural cold as his lips had been.
I try to focus on it, to understand it, but my mind is shutting down, the darkness at the edges of my vision pressing inward.
Oh, Goddess, please save me one more time, I beg silently. I swear I will never be entranced by a pierced lip again.
"Are you sure she's the one?" one of the men behind Cole asks. His voice is a low, gruff rumble that sits closer to animal than human.
"She should be. She has the aura." Cole's eyes stay locked on mine. "I watched her dance. And I'm sure she turned nineteen not long ago…"
The words land like cold water. He was the one.
The gaze that sent chills crawling up my spine on the dance floor… it was him, all along.
I would have laughed at the sheer, horrible irony of it if I weren't so close to dying. I fled the feeling inside the club and walked directly into its arms outside.
"What… what did you do to me?" My voice is barely a whisper now, my vocal cords as heavy as the rest of me.
"Nothing that your own curiosity didn't bring about." He leans in as if to kiss me again. I manage—barely—to jerk my head to the side.
He only laughs. "Too late for that, Draken girl. You already have my toxins in your system from that first graze of our lips."
I swallow, and even that small movement costs me. Toxins. The word settles into my chest like a stone.
I am doomed.
"Please…"
"Don't bother," he says, all warmth gone from his voice. "You'll be dead before the night ends. We just need you alive long enough to harvest your essence, and then—"
He stops.
His nose tilts upward. His entire body goes still with the sudden, focused attention of a predator who has just detected something it wasn't expecting. The others feel it too—I watch the shift move through them like a current.
Then another figure walks into the alley.
Tall. Unhurried. A gait so familiar it reaches me even through the fog.
The atmosphere in the narrow space snaps taut, like a string pulled to its limit. Cole retreats to his group, the five of them drawing together into a horizontal line. Five against one.
I squint through the haze, willing my eyes to focus. The newcomer steps forward until the distant light catches the precise color of his eyes.
Forest green.
Tavric?
How—
"Who are you?" Cole's voice drops into the same low register as his companion's growl. "Leave now while we're asking nicely. The girl is with us."
Tavric's voice is exactly as I remember it. Unhurried. Almost casual, as if he has merely wandered into an old acquaintance's gathering.
"That can't be, Hunter," he says. His eyes don't leave mine. "Because she is mine."
The raw possessiveness of those two words registers somewhere beneath the fog—I feel them even if I can't fully process them.
Right now, however, I don't care about implications. I don't care about what he means or what he thinks he's claiming. I only want to be saved.
My legs give out entirely. I slide down the dirty brick wall and hit the cold ground, my head lolling to one side.
"He is… right," I hear myself drawl, the words slow and thick. "I came… with him."
"She isn't going anywhere," Cole repeats, not even glancing down at me. His indifference is complete and total.
Of course my words are lost on him.
I am already lost on him.