YOU’LL UNDERSTAND IF, OVER TIME, I have become wary of other people’s plans in Mayfair.
Vampire Central was Leandra’s old stomping grounds—this was where she resided for most of her life, working her way up the ranks until she was the late queen’s right-hand vamp. I’d broken into the place not that long ago with Allie and Phoebus, thinking we were all sneaky about it, but Leandra had been right when she said the vampires knew we were there the whole time. Because Phoebus was colluding with them.
And then there was the plan where Diosa threw me at the mercy of a hungry, dangerous werewolf and I got mauled by Patricia’s vampires instead. So maybe I had some trust issues from the past, but I trusted Leandra.
To an extent.
“We’re going to get in to Vamp Central,” I repeated back to her, “and get caught on purpose.”
“Yes. Is there any part that confuses you?”
We were waiting in line at a Walmart self-checkout a block away from the abandoned mall where the vampires held court. The only thing in our basket was a roll of twine.
“What if they hurt us? Or kill us?”
“Diosa wouldn’t do that,” she insisted. “But she’ll know we’re there regardless of how we get in. The problem is that they won’t let us in voluntarily, no matter how much we knock on all the doors and yell. Once we’re in, she’ll have to deal with us.”
That was less than reassuring. “You’re sure today is blood tab delivery day?”
“Unless they switched companies. I can’t imagine they’ve changed too much. It’s inconvenient. The tab company has delivered on this day every month for the past four decades.”
Once again, a plan with too many variables to keep track of. Unsurprisingly, my least favorite kind of plan. I didn’t know a lot about blood tabs, but I’d worked in customer service before. Delivery schedules are never as set in stone as people say they will be. “And you hate it when I beat people up for my bounties, but you want to maim a service worker just for the chance to be murdered by your sire,” I said.
Leandra waved the basket at me. “Maim is a strong word. That’s why I’m getting this twine.”
❧
And that’s how we ended up hiding in the bushes outside of the vampire mall equipped with nothing but twine and the will to beat up the guy who delivers the blood pills.
“It’s like a bad game of Clue,” I whispered. “Leandra and Olympia, in the bushes, with some twine.”
“Kinky,” she said at normal volume, apparently unconcerned that anyone would hear us and deter us from this ridiculous plan. “They call it Cluedo in Europe.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Why tell me that? How do I know you’re not making it up?”
Of course, the blood tab delivery driver decided that was the best moment to pull into the mall’s parking lot.
I didn’t expect the delivery to be so…industrial, I guess. The truck was nice, newer, and had a real logo of blood drops on the side—colored blue, with a name that made it sound like a water bottle company. I had to give points to whoever came up with the cover brand for originality.
The semi made beeping noises as it backed up to the building, and then a guy in a uniform consisting of a hat and a pair of overalls hopped out and let down a ramp from the back. He knocked on the mall’s side door, three sharp raps, and it opened as if activated remotely. Then, he started the laborious process of wheeling a giant palette of wrapped boxes down the ramp and through the door.
“They have a company with a logo and all that?” I hissed to Leandra.
“Of course. There’s a corporation for everything.” She waited until he disappeared into the building and then nudged me forward. “Alright, he’s got two palettes of blood tabs. We should get in on the second one.”
We crept up to the side of the truck, silent as snakes. The guy stopped at the bottom of the ramp when he’d gotten the second palette down and took off his hat to mop at the sweat on his flattened hair. The boxes did not look light. He wiped his hands off on his overalls and then went to pick up the palette again.
Leandra was in front of him in a flash. She clamped a hand over his mouth. Guiltily, I snuck in behind her, watching his eyes bulge in surprise.
“It’s nothing personal,” Leandra said, “but I’m going to have to tie you up.”
The resigned look in the truck driver’s eyes told me that this was not the first time something like this had happened to him. I hoped there was some kind of workers’ compensation that he’d be eligible for. With the deft technique of a well-seasoned girl scout, Leandra tied him up so tightly that it would be hours before anyone could undo all the knots. Was that something she knew how to do before becoming a vampire or something that Patricia had required all her vamps learn in order to work for her? I remembered how badly Patricia’s minions had tied me up the time that they kidnapped me and decided Leandra probably picked it up as a hobby, like how to solve a Rubik’s cube. She caught me admiring her handiwork and gave me a little smile that didn’t quite fit the situation of tying up an innocent bystander.
We left the driver and the second palette outside. Leandra closed the door behind us. This was a back hallway of the mall, probably where deliveries had been made when it was actually used as a shopping center and not a posh vampire den.
It was completely empty.
“Now what?” I asked.
Leandra’s brow furrowed. She opened her mouth to say something, and then I couldn’t hear anything at all over the blast of a gunshot.
Leandra lurched forward; her shoulder blossomed with blood. There was another bang as something hit me from behind. I hissed in pain. Shaking, I felt around my back, tracing the length of my ribs.
My fingertips came away dark red with blood.
I learned, then, that vampires can still suffer from shock. I watched Leandra being dragged away by a figure in black like it was a distant thing, a dream. Someone grabbed hold of me from behind and I could feel the pain of the gunshot wound, the scraping of my legs against the ground. A blindfold went over my eyes, and only then did it register that I needed to fight back—but now there were several pairs of hands on me, holding me still as they dragged me away.
A door opened somewhere ahead of us. Voices—one I recognized and one I didn’t, surprisingly nonchalant, casual while I was being hauled away somewhere against my will. So much for Diosa not wanting us to get hurt, I thought as they threw me to the ground. My knees ached.
“Oh, my. You shot her?” Diosa’s voice. It was almost rehearsed.
Like she knew we were coming.
“You said any trespassers should be shot on sight,” a gruff voice said from behind me.
“Good, good. Glad you’re following instructions so closely. This is a friend of mine, though. Take that blindfold off.”
A friend? The blindfold came off and I squinted into the room. It must have previously been a small storage space of some sort, but they’d decked it out in velvet drapes and comfortable couches. Diosa sat with her chair slightly turned in my direction at a table that once belonged to a restaurant. She was seated across from a vampire I didn’t know. A white vamp with platinum blond hair, decked out in all black. There was a chess board between them. The other vampire rolled a pawn around in her hands, watching me thoughtfully.
“How have you been, Olympia?” Diosa asked.
Blood leaked from my wound, wet and hot. I was supposed to be healing faster than this, but then, I’d never been this injured since turning. They must’ve used a silver bullet. “I’ve been better.” My voice was hoarse.
“Get her a cup of blood, will you?” she said to someone behind me. She looked too big to occupy her chair—she was all muscle and tattoos, shifting tendons and power. Per the other times I’d met her, she was dressed like she might go out for a jog in the suburbs at any minute, this time in a hot pink tracksuit.
A glass tumbler full of dark, thick liquid was handed to me. I sniffed it first—to make sure she wasn’t going to drug me—and then drank from it greedily, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. The disrupted skin where the bullet had entered repaired itself, sinew snapping back together.
The chess players paid me no mind. The blonde vampire across from Diosa made a move and captured one of her knights.
“I know why you’re here,” Diosa said to me. She waved away the other vampires in the room. “You’re here because of Beatrice Newell.”
My mouth dropped open. I wondered for a second if I’d heard her correctly. “Beatrice?”
“Yes?” Diosa moved her piece on the game board. Her brow furrowed in what might have been frustration. “Haven’t you been looking for her?”
All-knowing Diosa, on a different page than me? It was unthinkable. I dug around for an answer that wouldn’t give too much away and settled on, “Uh. Not particularly.”
Diosa blinked at me like I was stupid. “Did you not notice she’s been gone?”
“No, I did.” I moved to a sitting position on the floor and rubbed at my knee. “Allie was looking into it, actually. Where’s Leandra?”
Diosa just shook her head. “I can’t believe…well.” The blonde vampire snickered. “Ren, dear, will you be a doll and leave us for a bit?”
She pouted. I watched their interaction, fascinated, as Ren got up and caressed Diosa’s cheek. It was too intimate for me to be privy to, but I couldn’t look away as Ren planted the tenderest of kisses on Diosa’s lips.
I caught a flash of fishnets when Ren stood—and realized she was the same witch-vampire that had been lurking in Morgana Hall outside of Beatrice’s office. She’d said she was one of Beatrice’s students. I narrowed my eyes at them, probably looking more like I was bitter about their relationship than questioning Ren’s identity.
“Yes, baby.”
Ren kissed her again. I shifted on the floor, considering whether it was a good time to make a break for it or whether I’d just get shot again just in time to watch the vampire saunter out of the room like she meant to come back later and do unspeakable things to Diosa.
Diosa’s watchful eyes tracked her like she wanted those unspeakable things to happen sooner rather than later.
I decided not to ask Diosa about it for now. It made sense that she’d send someone out to look for Beatrice if she noticed that she’d been missing. “You’ve made yourself really comfortable here.”
“Yes, I think I fit in quite well.” She gestured across from her. “Come, have a seat.”
“You aren’t going to make me play chess, are you?” I asked as I settled my aching body into Ren’s still-warm chair.
She snorted. “I’m not very good at it. Ren likes it.”
Huh. Who would’ve thought Diosa could be an attentive girlfriend? “Where’s Leandra?”
“With some others. Obviously. Why are you here if not for Beatrice?”
“I would like to see Leandra so that I know she’s safe.”
Diosa set her chin in her hand. “It doesn’t work like that. I have the upper hand here. I need a favor from you first.”
Impatiently, I drummed my fingers against the table. “I’m listening.”
“Do you know why I came to Mayfair?”
Not this again. “I assume you’re going to tell me.”
She smirked. “The vampires were disappearing in Europe. You remember that.”
“I thought they were your vampires. The ones you brought here to usurp Patricia and become the new vampire queen.”
“Queen? Usurp?” Diosa clucked her tongue. “We don’t use titles of colonialism here. The vampires who live in this mall are my friends, my colleagues. I have earned their respect.”
In some ways, she reminded me of Allie. The sudden comparison jolted me. Both of them had earned respect in their communities. Both of them were powerful. The only difference was that I knew Allie would be a good leader, while I wasn’t sold on Diosa yet.
“Some of the vampires who went missing joined my ranks, that’s true. I recruited many,” Diosa said. “But some of them were being killed by Patricia to prevent them from teaming up with me.”
I’d suspected as much before. “That’s common enough knowledge if you know where to look.”
“There’s a third subset of vampires. Those who were neither Patricia’s victims nor interested in my agenda.”
This conversation was wearing me out. It was clear that she enjoyed my squirming. “And?”
Diosa leaned forward. Her voice became a harsh whisper. “Olympia, what I tell you cannot leave this room. You can’t tell the council, not even your precious Allie Godden, and you can’t tell any bounty hunters.”
“What trust you have in me,” I murmured. Notably, she’d left out Leandra.
“This is a matter,” she said, reaching for the queen on her side of the chess board, “of life and death.”
My pulse raced. I shouldn’t have been as excited as I was; after that last bounty didn’t pan out the way I wanted, though, the idea of doing something risky was thrilling. I cleared my throat to hide my interest. “What does it have to do with Beatrice? Is she safe?”
She waved a dismissive hand in the air. “She’s fine, as far as I know. Beatrice sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong. She was getting awfully close to the truth.”
The excitement turned into heavy dread. “Someone shut her up because she was getting close to the truth?”
“No, I believe she just followed the truth to its source. Though it’ll be to my benefit that you know if she gets caught, she will be punished.” She smiled. It was deadly, sharp. “You’d better catch her first.”
“What are you asking me to do?”
“I was once part of a…group.” She fingered a chain around her neck that disappeared into the top of her tracksuit. “They were united by a singular goal. A purpose. And I shared that purpose.”
“You’re being awfully vague.”
“It’s hard to talk about, sometimes. So many bad memories. Bad apples. Patricia joined them only just before she died. Isn’t that funny? I left around the time that she joined. I just knew she was going to cause some serious trouble for this town. I didn’t stop her in time.”
“Diosa, what the hell are you talking about?”
She lifted her eyes from the chess board. “I miss when you used to call me Dee.”
“That was before I knew how dangerous you really were.”
“I’ve only helped you.”
I looked away. I knew it was true; she really had only helped me out, even the times she put me directly in the line of fire. She’d killed the vampire queen that had promised to come after me. She’d contributed to luring Leandra back to Mayfair when Leandra had been hiding in Europe. She’d done what she could to stop Phoebus from killing me while a whole war went down in Vampire Central. Then, obviously, she’d also ordered me shot.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked again.
“The group has moved into Mayfair.”
I gasped sharply. “Into the woods?”
“How did you know?”
The Woods Pack leaving because someone else had moved in made more sense now. I couldn’t fathom what kind of group could kick a pack of fearsome werewolves off of their own turf. “Who the hell are these people? What do they want?”
“They’re vampires, like I said. They…worship the sun.”
Now that was the most absurd thing I’d heard all day. Worse than Europeans naming a board game Cluedo. “They worship the thing that can destroy them?”
“It’s kind of poetic, isn’t it?” she asked. She leaned back in her chair. A dreamy look took over her face.
I took a second to think over what she’d said. About sharing a purpose. “Do you worship the sun?”
“Not quite,” she said. “You see, they push people out that they don’t think fit in. I tried for years to make my way up the ranks. They let in plenty of people. Patricia, almost right away, from what I hear. Viktor Lehmann.” Her eyes flashed when she said his name; he was a brief obsession of Leandra’s, back when she was seeking true immortality. “I wasn’t white or European enough to let into their inner circle. I need you to infiltrate it.”
“Pardon?”
“I need you to infiltrate the sunshine cult for me.”
The word cult cut through me like ice. “With Leandra?”
“Of course.” She clapped her hands. Two vampires opened the door. Leandra was between them, looking salty as hell, ripping against their clutches until they let her go, leaving her to close the distance herself.
“Wow,” she said when she saw us. “I was fighting off my kidnappers while you two were playing chess?”
“Diosa wants us to use our white privilege to infiltrate a cult of vampires that worship the sun,” I blurted.
Leandra blinked. And then she blinked again. “Am I being Punk’d?”
Inwardly, I cringed. “Nobody says that anymore.”
“Why would we do that for you?” she asked, turning to Diosa.
Diosa closed her eyes as if frustrated. Interesting—so few things seemed to bother her. Comfortably, Leandra’s hand settled on my shoulder. Taking her place behind me. It felt good to have her back. Her own bullet wound wasn’t bleeding anymore; they must have fed her, too.
“Why did you have us shot?” Leandra said.
“I have a guy on the inside who’s going to take you to the cult. It looks better if you’ve been roughed up.”
“Do we get a say in this?” I asked.
“Of course,” Diosa said.
“I feel like you haven’t given me all the details.”
“Why were you discussing this without me?” Leandra snapped.
I thought I knew why. I met Diosa’s even gaze.
“You’re right, of course,” Diosa said. She lifted the necklace out of her shirt. Its chain pooled in the center of the table. At the end of it gleamed a blood-red ruby. “The reason they have so much power is because of this.”
“A knockoff ruby necklace?” Leandra said.
“It’s not a knockoff,” Diosa said. “It was never meant to be a ruby. I don’t know exactly what it is, how it’s made. But I would like to have more of them.”
Unbidden, my fingers twitched toward it. Diosa snatched it back up, swallowing it in her hand. “No touching.”
“What does it do?”
It had not occurred to me that it could do anything until Leandra asked the question.
“It has to do with the sun. You have to be in the inner circle to get one—I stole this.” She snickered. “And Patricia’s.”
“You want more of them,” Leandra repeated.
“Yes, of course,” Diosa said. “And I know they’re hiding how they make them. Really, I’d like the secret recipe so I could mass produce some for me and my friends. I want you two to figure out what their technique is so we can dismantle the group together. If it’s not exclusive, we don’t have to keep it only to those they deem worthy. Anyone can have their own power.”
“Sounds like you want us to do most of the heavy lifting,” I said.
“And you’ll be greatly rewarded,” said Diosa.
“We don’t need money,” Leandra said.
“Would you like to walk around during the day without being incinerated?”
Leandra’s grip on my shoulder tightened. “There’s no way.”
But what if there was? “What about the vampire,” I said, “that attacked his demon girlfriend during the day?”
“You have been doing some investigating.” Diosa nodded approvingly. “I tried to shut that up. We don’t want people to panic.”
I considered this. Surely it didn’t benefit Diosa to hide an entire cult from Mayfair’s true leadership. “It might be better to get more people involved. The council, for example. They’re better equipped to keep people in line or drive out the cult or whatever.”
“They did such a good job driving me out, didn’t they?” Diosa said.
It was hard to refute her sass. Her relationship with the council was fraught, to say the least. I turned back to Leandra. “She says Beatrice went after them.”
Leandra’s eyes widened. “Why would she…? Damn it, Beatrice. So we have to go. We’re not going to infiltrate any dangerous cults for you, though, Diosa. We’re going to find her and get her out of there.”
“She won’t leave until she’s gotten to the bottom of it,” Diosa said, eyes twinkling. “She’s a scholar. They’re very curious, you know.”
I knew, then, that we would do it. That I had to do it. Whether Beatrice was there or not, it was like Diosa was dangling her on a thread in front of us. The carrot. I had no doubt she’d resort to the stick, if needed.
“Okay,” I said. And damn my chaotic Unseelie heart if I wasn’t a little bit excited. Leandra squeezed my shoulder again, this time reassuringly. She was in. “We’ll do it.”