Pas Read Free

that time, Deirdre was already home—at least, what currently passed for home at Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise—accompanied by a dozen satiated vampires and coolers filled with blood bags.
    There would be a party to celebrate the night’s victory. They loved parties, those vampires. They loved to crawl under clouds of lethe and vibrating bass to forget how badly they were starving. They loved to share blood while clinging to one another, bodies twisted with rapture.
    They loved to pretend they weren’t dead.
    Normally, Deirdre helped entertain them. It was good for their alliance. It was what Stark would have done.
    With the dead witch’s eyes in her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to linger.
    She went upstairs.
    Just a couple of months earlier, Deirdre had been invited to Everton Stark’s room at the asylum for the first time. She had been surprised to find that he’d lived in the same squalor that the rest of the pack did—the same kind of tiny, water-stained, concrete box that his Omega had slept in.
    At the time, Deirdre had attributed his choice of living environment to a sense of equality with the people who obeyed him. Psychopathic or not, she had believed that Stark was truly a man of the people.
    Now she knew that it had nothing to do with equality.
    She knew so many more things than she used to.
    Deirdre had followed Stark’s lead when choosing one of Chadwick Hawfinch’s apartments for herself. It was as sparse as those that the vampires occupied throughout the rest of the building, and positioned directly above the lobby celebration. The floor was thin. She could hear them carousing in the way that only vampires flush with blood would.
    At other times, the vampires would be quiet, sullen, low-energy, and miserable. Always on the brink of starvation, never capable of dying because they had already passed on from the lives they used to know. But tonight, they had fresh blood. Some of them had even sipped it from the veins of the guard before she died. A rare pleasure.
    They were happy.
    Deirdre could hear their happiness below her as she bolted the door to her apartment.
    When she flicked on the bedside lamp, cockroaches scattered.
    She’d been itchy ever since taking that apartment. Deirdre wasn’t sure if it was something she imagined because of the cockroach infestation or if there were bedbugs. She healed lesions too quickly to tell if she were really being chewed upon.
    Chances were good she imagined the itchy sensations.
    She wasn’t imagining the constant skittering of insect legs within the walls or the drip-drip-drip of leaking rain.
    The mattress whined as she sat. The brown stains on the exposed, flattened pillow top could have been perceived as coffee spills if she’d been feeling optimistic. She hadn’t even kicked off her boots before climbing up. What was one more stain among a thousand others?
    Deirdre clamped the intake bracelet on her wrist.
    The bite of metal teeth didn’t hurt anymore. The sting must have been followed by healing fever, but she didn’t feel that either.
    Vampires thudded downstairs while she took a cube of lethe from a wooden box on her bedside table. The faint glow of blue turned her latte-brown skin a sickly gray. When she rolled the cube between the pad of her forefinger and thumb, the lethe within swirled silvery-slick, like oil on the surface of the ocean tossed by a hurricane.
    A sound that wasn’t celebration caught her ear. She nudged the broken blinds up an inch, peering down at the street through a crack between the boards nailed on the other side.
    Movement swirled over the dark street, punctuated by the flashlights on cell phones, some lighters, a flashlight or two. Some kind of citizen patrol. Wouldn’t be long before that front of the storm smashed into an OPA patrol and turned into violence.
    Didn’t matter to Deirdre. The election was coming. There’d be a new Alpha by the time the sun rose again twice, and there’d be nothing worth