Chapter 6

Through watering eyes, she looked at the fangs beginning to show at the corners of his mouth and managed to shake out one entirely useless sentence. "My — my blood doesn't taste good—"

The man clearly disagreed.

He put his face into the hollow of her throat and breathed in the wet scent of blood with real hunger, licking with something close to devotion at that thin layer of skin over the faintly moving vessel underneath, his narrowed eyes and his whole expression written over with rapture.

An expression which, on the face of a predator, read as rapture — and which the food underneath him experienced as pure horror.

She was going to be eaten.

She was going to be drained.

She absolutely refused to become a dried-out corpse.

Fear of death took over the whole of Mary's head and produced one last burst of strength, which she spent thrashing, and which he absorbed without shifting a millimeter.

Then the fangs came to rest against her neck and the cold prick of them went numbing through her entire body.

And with her mind stretched so tight it had gone completely blank, Mary did something neither party had anticipated.

Before he could bite her, she snapped her head down and bit him, hard, in the shoulder.

There was a rule for emergencies like this: if he was going to strike, she was striking first.

His neck happened to be right at her mouth, which made the counterattack unusually smooth to execute, and unusually vicious.

When she let go, however, she discovered that the pale skin carried nothing but a shallow dent. She hadn't even broken it.

I used everything I had. My teeth hurt.

What, Mary wondered, is this guy's skin made of?

Her bite had successfully interrupted his meal. It had also comprehensively enraged him.

The hand on her throat tightened.

Nails that had gone sharp and pointed in an instant opened the fragile skin without effort.

Warm blood ran immediately out of the small cuts.

"You dare bite me."

There was a cold murderous intent in the low voice, and the air within ten meters seemed to set solid. Even the enormous dragon that had been snorting nearby went quiet and curled itself up small, not daring to make a sound.

Mary squeezed her eyes shut and shook past any control.

And just as she was certain she was about to die there, a squad of soldiers on flying mounts came charging into the scene.

"Captain Michael!"

"Captain!"

The squad, finally in daylight protection gear and finally caught up, were startled to discover that the captain they had come to find was in the company of the escaped organism.

And judging by the posture, the relationship appeared to be somewhat irregular.

"Captain, there you are! Excellent — you've already caught the thing?"

"Ah, Captain, we do have to explain. Momentary oversight. None of us anticipated it wouldn't fear sunlight, which is how it got out of the quarantine zone."

"Hold on. Does anybody else smell that?"

"That's — that's extraordinary. What is that?"

"It's blood! That's the smell of blood!"

"Yes. It's blood."

"That's blood, no question."

Something changed in every pair of eyes as the soldiers came down off their mounts and moved closer.

Something instinctive turned them, and they began to close in on the source of the scent — on Mary, held down under Michael.

Michael took one look at his men beginning to stir, said nothing at all, spread his black cloak with one arm, wrapped the human in his grip from head to foot until no part of her showed, then picked her up crosswise and turned toward his dragon.

The men he was leaving behind did not let it go. There was a note in their questions now, of a wanting they couldn't govern.

"That's blood."

"It's so sweet. Where is it? Where is that blood?"

"Captain, you smell it too. That is — that is a top-grade rarity."

Michael stopped walking and said sharply, without turning his head, "Back."

An order from a superior stopped them where they stood. They asked nothing further and withdrew respectfully.

Mary, meanwhile, was close to being smothered inside an airtight black cloak with both arms and both legs bound so tightly she couldn't move any of them. All she could do was thrash her head around trying to find a gap.

Her nose and mouth came free and she immediately began gulping air.

"Wait. The smell's back."

"It's blood. That's the smell of blood."

The soldiers who had just been called off stirred again at once, every gaze swinging toward their captain with open hunger.

Michael, irritated, shoved the disobedient head burrowing its way out of his cloak firmly back inside it, and said, low, by way of cover, "A minor injury. Don't make a production of it."

"Ah — the captain is wounded. Our apologies, sir."

"Sacred Blood... has a scent like that? I've never smelled it before."

"Captain, please look after yourself."

Michael had no attention to spare for his subordinates' commentary or their well-wishes. All of it was going toward keeping Mary pinned in his arms while she made a muffled noise and struggled continuously to get out.

He answered them absently, and was preparing to get onto the dragon's back and leave this troublesome scene at speed, when his deputy Charles stopped him with a very serious face.

"Captain. A word." Charles had the freshly compiled investigation report on The Wanderer in his hands, and he chose his words carefully. "That organism you're holding is not one of the Blood."

"I know." Michael's answer carried no interest at all.

He had known the instant he tasted the blood. Nothing of the Blood tastes like that.

"If you know, then I would ask you to handle it carefully. It is an unknown species. If its blood carries a neurotoxin, the way certain low-grade hybrids do, the consequences would be severe."

"Charles. My painfully by-the-book deputy." Michael made a cold noise. "I don't recall you taking this much interest in whether I lived before. That line came down from the Council, didn't it? They're afraid the last Montero might carelessly get himself killed and take the whole House with him. Is that it?"

Charles didn't deny it.

"There is that consideration, yes. But I'd ask you not to dispose of it on your own authority, and not entirely for your own safety, my lord Marquess." He shifted to the more formal address. "Having reviewed the preliminary report, the Council of Elders has taken a strong interest in an organism so similar to the Blood and yet so completely unlike it. The order has already been issued: it goes to Evernight immediately. And that instruction came directly from Lord Matthew Gonzalez."

Michael glanced back at his deputy.

A cunning man. Producing his title at exactly that moment, purely to remind him that the hierarchy of the Blood is a thing one obeys.

An order from the Council, then.

Among the Blood, rank is a rigid thing.