Witch's Wrath (Blood And Magick #3)(31)

“You look it. Sharp, I mean. You look intelligent.”

“Thank you. I’ve come to learn that to be a good trait to have in this day.”

“You’re right. Looks don’t get people nearly as far as they think. Not that you don’t have them; you’re very beautiful.”

Delphine smiled again, then she laughed, and when she laughed, her dark curls bounced above her delicate, pale shoulders. Meanwhile, my cheeks started to burn like the sun. I had never met a woman whose presence was so intoxicating, so dizzying. Did she have this effect on everyone, or just me?

We had walked another half-block before I decided to go in for another question, but Delphine suddenly stopped dead in her tracks and perked up like a cat who had heard a distant, foreign sound. She was so light-footed, if she hadn’t grabbed my arm with her ice-cold hand, I may have kept walking.

“What?” I whispered.

Then Delphine spoke one word that chilled my insides as well as my outsides. “Blood.”

“Blood? Where?”

“Ahead somewhere. Close. There isn’t much, but enough for me to smell it.”

“Jean Luc?”

Delphine shook her head. “His feeding grounds are elsewhere.”

I threw a cursory glance around at where we were. The street here was mostly dark, quiet, and residential. Full of innocent people. Blood in the air didn’t necessarily mean trouble, but what if someone had hurt themselves? Calling 911 seemed like a sensible idea, if that were the case. But I was lacking in the sensibility department nowadays, and if someone had been hurt it was far too close to my house for my liking.

“We need to go to it,” I said, “Can you take me to the source?”

She tugged my hand and brought me with her down the street, about another block, before slowing down at the entrance to an apartment building. The door was ajar, it was dark inside, and while I couldn’t smell any blood, the smell had become so potent for Delphine—who hadn’t yet fed tonight—she had to cover her nose with her hand just to be able to handle it.

I was about to approach, when from inside I heard a scared moan that rooted me to the spot and got my heart pumping. I snapped my head around to look at Delphine, wide-eyed and electrified with dread. Without wasting another second, I headed for the door and peered around the corner, but it was so dark in that corridor I couldn’t see a thing. There was someone down there, though—I was sure of it.

“Goddammit,” I said, under my breath, willing a spot of bright, white light to manifest at the tip of my index finger. The light wasn’t bright enough to reach the end of the corridor, but the shapes in the deepest part of it became a little clearer to the eye. What I saw made me almost want to turn around and start running.

Someone—a man—had a young woman, no older than eighteen, pinned to a wall. He had forced her neck to the side and had his mouth pressed against her skin. The light caught the woman’s glistening eyes, her pained face, and the colorful beads falling at her chest, but the bloodsucker seemed to be almost oblivious, as if drinking the woman’s blood was more important than being discovered.

“Hey!” I yelled, and the vampire turned his attention toward me in an instant, his eyes—his eye—glowing with bright, golden light. Then I realized, I knew who this vampire was. A flash of memory played in front of my eyes of me impaling the heel of my shoe into a vampire’s face, and the heel coming away with his eye attached to it.

The thing dropped the girl, hissed, and immediately started to charge to the mouth of the hallway. I barely had enough time to throw myself to the side of the door when the vampire burst out of the dark opening like a bat out of hell. I started to push myself away from the wall I had pinned myself up against, but the vampire moved so fast I hadn’t moved an inch before he was on me, his powerful hands pressing my shoulders against the wall.

He snarled in my face, and his mouth smelled like copper. “I know you, witch,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, heart thumping, “How’s the eye?”

He scowled and grabbed my chin, pressing his fingers so tightly against my face I thought my bones would crumble beneath his hand. Delphine appeared behind him. She grabbed his shoulder and forced him around with her superhuman strength, and as he spun, she drew her splayed fingers across his face and drew four lines of split, bleeding skin into it.

The vampire yowled, but released me, and I fell to my knees, clutching my burning jaw. Distantly, I was aware of the young girl the vampire had been feeding on running past me and into the night, and when I turned my eyes up, I was just in time to watch the vampire shove Delphine so hard the wall behind her fractured when she struck it. Then he started to advance on her, cracking his neck as he went and flexing his fingers.

“I’m going to have fun killing you both,” he snarled as he walked.

I planted my palm against the floor and grit my teeth. “You’re forgetting something,” I said, anger flooding through me now as the thought of what he—what his kind—did to us, to Remy.

He turned his head, his eyes glowing like stars in the night.

A breeze picked up around us, and my fist crackled with arcs of electric light. “It’s an even fight, now.”

The vampire’s brow creased during a momentary lapse of confusion. From my crouched position, I picked myself up and broke into a charge, throwing my crackling fist and hurling it at him as soon as I was close enough to hit him. Arrogantly, he didn’t move, didn’t try to dodge me. Instead he waited for me to get to him, lazily putting his hand up to block the punch, but when my fist made contact with the palm of his hand, a burst of energy surged through him like a thunderclap, with enough force to do to him what he had done to Delphine.