“I told him vampires shouldn’t exist,” she says, her words rough and difficult to understand with how bad she’s shaking. “I told him to kill every vampire he knows in New York.”
A curse leaves my lips, even though it’s exactly what I was expecting.
“What else?” Harry asks, his voice low and icy calm.
My stomach drops out. No. There is nothing else. That alone is horrific enough. There can’t be anything else.
But as I look at Ophelia, I see what Harry sees. She’s holding something back.
And from the way the terror on her face deepens, I know it’s going to be bad.
Ophelia’s eyes slip from Harry’s to fix on the surface of the bed. “I told him to kill every vampire he knows in New York and, when he was done, to kill himself.”
My stomach disappears. My world tilts on its axis. All the oxygen in the room evaporates.
A curse slips from my lips. I turn from the vault, and my feet move before my brain can process everything I just learned.
“Ares!” his name rips from my lips as a scream as I dart back out into the city.
Chapter 7
Iburst out of the building, slamming the heavy door shut behind me, leaving Ophelia in the cold, sterile darkness with Harry.
This fear—this unrelenting panic—feels worse than anything I’ve ever experienced.
Ophelia told Ares to kill himself. I can’t think of any other vampires Ares knows except for Sysco, Harry, and James. Does Clementine count as a Bitten? Fuck. My fingers lace into my hair as I look up and down the street. How many vampires are left before Ares tries to hurt himself?
“Damn you, O,” I curse as panic stings the backs of my eyes.
I sprint through the city like a woman possessed. My body, still unfamiliar with its newfound power, moves faster than I ever have before, but it’s not fast enough. The streets blur around me, pedestrians dodging out of my way, honking cars skidding to halts as I cut through traffic like a reckless specter.
All the while, my sharpened eyes scan faces, searching for the one and only one that matters to me.
I shove through a crowd at an intersection, ignoring the shouted curses that follow. My mind is a chaotic mess of terror and rage. He’s out there, somewhere, alone and hunting,teetering on the edge of something I can’t let happen. The image of him—his beautiful, unbreakable body mangled and lifeless—flashes through my mind, and a strangled sound escapes my throat.
No. Fuckno, I will not let that happen.
My stomach twists violently. The air feels too thick to breathe. How could she do this? How could she play with his mind like this, with his life? How do relationships break so wholly that she could do this to me? Once upon a time, Ophelia loved me, and I loved her. But now she can take no thought to tell the man I love to end his own life. What it would do to me if Ares were dead…
The Ares I know, the man I love, is still in there. But he’s drowning, lost in a compulsion that isn’t his own. And if I don’t reach him in time, he will finish what she told him to do.
I push harder, my feet barely touching the pavement as I scan faces. Where would he go? If his phone is dead, I can’t track him that way. He hasn’t gone home. He isn’t at the office. He’s been hunting vampires, but there’s no pattern—no clear logic to where he’ll be next.
Think, Lana.Think!
This racing around is pointless.
I realize it and slow in an instant. If Ares is hunting vampires, he’s not wandering around in the daylight on the streets. Ares is smart. He’s purposeful. I’m never going to just spot him on the sidewalk.
In desperation, I circle back around to the simplest solution.
I grab my phone and open our text thread, my fingers shaking as I send another message:
Where are you? Please, Ares, answer me.
I hit send and wait, but I don’t expect anything. For two days now, my messages have gone undelivered, as if he’s been in some kind of black hole, unreachable. I don’t expect that to change now, but when I glance back at the screen, my heart leaps into my throat.
Delivered.
