Chapter 1 The Progenitor's Blood Bag

Alaina's POV

The year I turned twenty, the Hunter Association shoved me into Nomon's castle.

They said Nomon needed blood.

They also said that if I handled the job well, I'd get to keep living.

So here I am in his banquet hall, a rag in my hand, wiping down a wine glass. Afternoon light slants across the balcony and catches a smear of blood along the rim that I didn't manage to get clean.

"Alaina. Come here."

My fingers stop dead against the bottom of the glass. A second later I put down the rag, turn, and walk out onto the balcony.

Nomon R. Smoke is draped in a rocking chair. Neat gray hair, an immaculate white shirt, long clean fingers — fingers far too clean to belong to a monster.

That's the hardest part. A real monster ought to be all fangs and claws, stinking of rot. He just sits in the sun like an old-fashioned nineteenth-century gentleman waiting on his tea.

"Your wrist," he says.

I walk toward him. With every step, my survival instinct is drawing escape routes for me: balcony door, corridor, stairs, the nearest glass window.

Am I scared? Obviously.

Only a fool with something loose in his head stands in front of a vampire progenitor and calls shaky legs courage.

I kneel on one knee beside his chair, unbutton my cuff, and offer him my wrist.

"As you wish, my lord."

The words stick in my throat like a swallowed razor blade.

Nomon takes my wrist. His hand is cold as stone, and strong enough to crush bone without trying. He's doing it on purpose, rough, like he's testing where my limits are.

The instant his fangs break skin, the reflex in my muscles nearly yanks my hand back.

The thought lands harder than the pain — I want to shove him off, want to jump up, want to pull the nine-millimeter out of my boot and put a silver round straight through his heart.

But I don't move. Not yet.

I count silently. On four, inhale. On six, exhale.

The first thing the Hunter Association taught me wasn't how to kill every last one of these vampires. It was how to control a body that would betray me at the first chance it got.

Pain loosens tongues. Ragged breathing shows your hand. If you want to live, you hold still as dead meat.

His appraising stare slowly withdraws, and he settles into feeding, slow and elegant, and in that moment every inch of him is an opening — an invitation handed right to me.

Warm blood slides down my wrist and drips onto the balcony stone. I don't look. Only dying prey stares at its own blood. A hunter doesn't.

So I stare at him instead.

The sun lands on the bridge of his nose, my blood on his lips, and God, it's a beautiful picture.

I don't look away. On a monster's own ground, even a flickering glance is an invitation to be read as weakness, and I can't afford to hand him a single one.

His fangs sink deeper, working me frantically.

Drink. Drink greedily. He doesn't know that the blood in me isn't clean.

Nomon drinks past all measure, and my knees start to give, my vision drifting, landing on the balcony railing, where a spider is wrapping a fly into its web, the fly still struggling, wings buzzing.

That sound is like an order issued inside my skull: live, stay, let him drink…

When Nomon finally lets go, my whole arm has gone numb. Blood wells from the punctures and soaks my skirt. He looks down at me through half-lowered lids, the way you'd size up how long a tool will hold.

"This one they sent," he says mildly, "is at last not a blood bag that breaks after a single use."

I've just been bled to the edge of collapse, and now I have to stand here while this bastard grades me like livestock at auction. Go to hell.

He runs a thumb across the blood on my wrist.

"You're strong, Alaina," he says, his voice soft as a troubadour's.

"If you hadn't told me otherwise, I'd almost have taken you for a hunter."

Hunter. The word makes my heart skip a beat.

Danger alarms detonate all over my body — my fingers want to curl, my throat wants to swallow hard, my eyes want to open and confirm what's in his. Three involuntary movements. Any one of them could be the death of me.

So I do nothing at all. I let my body go completely slack and sink down with the dizziness of blood loss, playing the part of a wreck with no strength left even for fear.

Fear is slamming around in my chest. I lock that door in my head and let it pound.

Old fox. There's no way he knows my background. He's only bluffing.

I want one more look at him. One glance and I could read whether this is a test — but my eyelids are too heavy…

Before the dark swallows me whole, the only thing left in my head is the last thing the Hunter Association told me:

Nomon needs blood. So be his most obedient blood bag.

I clamp down on my breathing and force my pulse as low as it will go.

I don't dare let my eyelids part even a hair, and in the blackness a cologne of mint and fir comes close.

His gaze presses into my face like a heated needle. The next second my feet leave the floor — that drop in the gut.

I'm dropped onto a bed so soft it seems obscene, the same damned mint hanging in the air.

Something like ice scrapes across my throat — his fingertips. He's unbuttoning my collar one button at a time, tugging my bra open, still moving down…

You bastard. Fuck!

A tearing sound — my A-line skirt is ripped open too.

Think you're going to rape me? Go fuck yourself.

His cold fingertips are like feathers touched with snow, sliding down my chest, skimming my belly, stopping on the inside of my thigh.

Every pore in my body is convulsing, and the urge to fight rolls through my veins like surf… any longer and it won't just be my body that gives me away — it'll be the gun in my boot—

His hair drifts across the skin of my shoulder and raises a chill through every pore. The next second something cold and sharp drives into my nipple. His fangs.

Now!

The move I've rehearsed a hundred times in my head erupts. My hand drives into my boot and comes up with the silver revolver.

My thumb snaps the hammer back — click! Two crisp metallic turns of the cylinder, locked dead onto the firing pin.

I jam the muzzle hard against the side of his head, his teeth still buried in my chest.

"I swear to God I will blow you to pieces, you scum!"

Wet heat spreads across my chest; his tongue circles the bitten nipple and he laughs low, rasping like sandpaper: "Baby, you played unconscious so well. This is only what you've earned."

He lifts his head. His gray eyes are already shot through with vampire blood, and those powerful eyes slam straight into mine.

"Put the gun down."

His voice carries blood in it, and the death-pressure of an apex predator spreads off him, suffocating as marsh gas.

The finger on the trigger shakes hard enough to sing against the metal.

My eyes flick, almost imperceptibly, to the grandfather clock on the wall — the second hand is two ticks short of the hour.

Listening to the cold click of the pendulum, I count hard in my head.

I let my finger shake, and like a puppet with its strings cut I lower the gun, stiffly, a notch at a time.

But in the very same second the muzzle clears his cheek — I drive my knee up with everything I have, straight into his crotch!

Nomon's brows knot together.

In the second the pain splits him open, I throw my arm around his neck and kiss him hard. My tongue hooks his fangs and forces the mint-and-blood breath back down his throat.

Three seconds left.

His tongue winds around mine on reflex, trying to take back control, to pull the air out of me.

One second left.

Checkmate.

Every muscle in Nomon's body gives out at once, and his heavy, cold weight crashes down on me, his breathing failing at a rate I can see.

I hook two fingers under his stubbled jaw and force his face up. The bloodthirsty red is draining out of his eyes fast, his pupils starting to scatter.

He drank my blood — and the inhibitor in it is just now coming on.

I shove him off with my foot, bring the silver gun up again, and lock it on the point between his brows.

The instant I pull the trigger the shot cracks the room open, both my ears ringing, the air thick with the stink of burnt powder. The recoil lands like a fist on my arm and knocks me back.

But what happens next I never imagined in a thousand years — it breaks the line between hunter and prey for good.

Nomon regards the bullet coming for his forehead, his head tipping to one side — the round only rakes through the loose hair at his temple.

But the next second his neck snaps back at a grotesque angle, bones creaking — and he meets the bullet with his forehead himself!

The bullet buries itself in his frontal bone. Nomon touches the black blood seeping from between his brows, looks at me, and smiles — a smile twisted past anything human.