Хлоя Нейл: Friday Night Bites

I wouldn’t fight her; I wasn’t stupid. But Catcher had taught me about the benefits of bluffing. Assuming I could keep my vampire in check, I owed it to the impotent Presidium to see what happened when I played Celina’s game.

I took a step forward, a step toward her, and ran the tip of my tongue across the tip of a needle-pointed canine. Vampire aggressive behavior. “Do you want to play, Celina? Do you want to know how strong I am? Do you want to see?”

She stared at me, magic flowing full force now, and I watched her eyes silver, like flipped coins catching the light. She took a step toward me, still eighteen or twenty feet between us.

“You’re hardly worth his time, Sentinel. Why would you be worth mine?”

I took another step forward. “You came here, Celina. To find me.”

“You’ll never be as good as me.”

There it was. The crack in the beguiling facade. Celina, beautiful and powerful and self-absorbed to a fault, was insecure.

I repeated the mantra. “You came here, Celina. To find me.”

She stilled, glared at me beneath half-lidded eyes, shadows and moonlight sharpening the angles of her face. She took a breath, seemed to calm herself, and smiled. And then she fought back.

“I know who you are, Merit. I know about your family.” She stepped forward. “I know about your sister.”

I flinched, the words as effective as a slap across the face.

Another step, and this time she grinned. She knew she’d landed a blow.

“Yes,” she said. “Best of all”—I could see the whites of her eyes and as if the cant of the words wasn’t threat enough, the hatred in her gaze—“I know about that night on campus.”

“Because you planned it,” I reminded her, my breath coming faster, my heart beginning to thud again.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said, tapping a red-manicured finger against her chest. “I had plans for you, I’ll admit. But I wasn’t the only one with plans.”

My heart sped at the insinuation. “Who else had plans?”

“You know, I forget. But it’s a pity you’ve had Peter extradited. He has so many interesting connections around town, don’t you think?”

It was trickery, I reminded myself. She was behind it. She’d planned my attack, my death, to wreak havoc in the city. She’d planned it. But she wasn’t the only one with knowledge, I reminded myself.

“I know about Anne Dupree, Celina. Did you and Edward have fun plotting and planning? Did George cry out when you beat him to death?”

Her smile faltered. “Bitch.”

I was really beginning to dislike Navarre vampires. Thinking they had much arrogance in common, I used the phrase I’d used before on her apparent protégé. “Bite me, Celina.”

She snapped her fangs at me. I flipped the thumb guard on my scabbard.

All right , that’s it . “Bring it, dead girl.”

She growled. I gripped the handle with my right hand, my heart thudding like a drum inside my chest.

Stupid, stupid, stupid , I thought, for baiting the crazy, but a little too late.

Moving so quickly that her body was a shiny black blur in the night, she advanced and kicked. She kicked with the force of a thundering freight train, and the unbelievable pain of it buckled my knees. I hit the ground, unable to catch a breath, unable to think or feel or react to anything but the crushing pain in my chest. A single kick shouldn’t have hurt so much, but my God, did it. A screaming, ripping pain that made me wonder that I’d ever doubted Celina Desaulniers.

One hand braced to keep my face from hitting the ground, tears spilled over, and I gripped my chest with my free hand, to rip out the pain, to rip out the vise that was squeezing the air from my lungs. I struggled for breath, and a wave of pain, a morbid aftershock, convulsed my spine.

“Ethan did this to you.”

I fought for air, looked up. She stood over me, hands on her hips.

I ground my fingers into the concrete, tunneled holes in the sidewalk, and tears pouring down my cheeks, watched her, hoping to God she wouldn’t kick me again, wouldn’t touch me again. Reminded myself—it was her plan. “No.”

She bent down at the waist, put a fingertip beneath my chin, raised it up. I heard a growl, realized it was me, and when another shock rocked my body, realized that if she hit me again, I’d be completely unable to fight back.

One kick, and she’d brought me down, even after two months of training. She called my bluff, and had taken me down. Could I ever be as strong as she was? As fast? Maybe not. But I’d be damned if I’d crawl away like a wounded animal.

Then and there, I swore to myself that I would never be on my knees before her again.

Heaving for breath, I pushed my way up, one slow, devastating inch at a time, black fabric shredded around knees I’d bloodied when I fell to the ground. Celina watched, a predator enjoying the last licking sighs of a wounded animal.

Or maybe more accurately, alpha predator, enjoying her victory over a lesser female.

Slow, agonizing seconds later, I was standing.

Inhale.

Exhale.

I cradled my ribs with my right hand, lifted my eyes to hers.

Bright, nearly indigo blue, they fairly twinkled with pleasure in the moonlight. “He did this to you,” she said. “Caused this pain. If you weren’t a vampire, if he hadn’t made you—if he’d taken you to the hospital instead of changing you, converting you for his own purposes—you’d be in school. You’d be with Mallory. Everything would be the same.”

I shook my head, but something about that sounded right.

Was it right?

In the midst of the pain, the fact that he’d saved me from her, from the killer she’d loosed on me, didn’t cross my mind.

“Confront him, Merit. See what you’re made of.”

I shook my head. Mutiny. Rebellion. He was my Master. I couldn’t fight him, wouldn’t fight him. I’d already challenged him once, my first week as a vampire, and I’d failed. I’d lost.

“He left you here for me to find. They both did.”

My ribs screamed, probably broken. Maybe internal bleeding. A punctured lung?

“All that effort,” she said, “just to breathe. Imagine if it had been a real fight, Sentinel. All that work, all that practice, and what have you to show for it?” She cocked her head, as if waiting for me to answer, but then offered, “He didn’t prepare you for me, did he?”

“Fuck you,” I managed to get out, gripping my side.

She arched a carefully shaped black eyebrow. “Don’t direct your ire at me, Sentinel, for teaching the lesson you needed. Blame Ethan. Your Master. The one who is supposed to care for you. Prepare you. Protect you.”

I ignored the words, but shook my head anyway, tried to will myself to think, but it was becoming more difficult. The pain was blurring the borders, forcing the reconciliation between whatever humanity was left, whatever predator lived inside me. I didn’t know what would happen if I let the vampire peek through, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold her back, not with the pain. The instinct was too strong, my defenses too weak. I’d repressed her, and she was tired of being relegated to some deep, dark corner of my psyche. I’d been a vampire for nearly two months, but had managed to shield myself in the remnants of my humanity.

No more , the vampire screamed.

“Don’t fight it,” Celina said, a tinge of lusty voyeurism in her voice.

The pain was too much, the night too long, my inhibitions too low. I stopped fighting it. I let it go.

I let her breathe.

I let her out.

She burst through my blood, the power of the vampire flowing through me, and as I kept my eyes on Celina, locked my limbs to keep from staggering back from the surge of it, I felt myself disassociate. I felt her move my body, stretch and test muscles inside my body—and sink into it.