The Beast

He pictured the last time they’d been alone.

It was a ritual of his before he engaged with the enemy, a mental talisman that he rubbed for luck, and tonight he saw her as she had stood in front of the mirror in their bedroom, the one that was over the tall bureau where they kept their watches and their keys, her jewelry and his Tootsie Pops, their phones.

She was up on her tiptoes, angled over the top, trying to put a pearl stud into her earlobe and missing the hole. With her head tilted to the side, her deep brown hair flowed over her shoulder and made him want to put his face into the freshly shampooed waves. And that wasn’t the half of what impressed him. The clean cut of her jaw caught and held the light from the crystal sconce on the wall, and her cream silk blouse draped over her breasts and was tucked into her tight waist, and her slacks fell to her flats. No makeup on her. No perfume.

But that would be like touching up the Mona Lisa or hitting a rosebush with a shot of Febreze.

There were a hundred thousand ways to detail his mate’s physical attributes, and not one single sentence, or indeed an entire book, that could come close to describing her presence.

She was the watch on his wrist, the roast beef when he was starving, and the pitcher of lemonade when he was thirsty. She was his chapel and his choir, the mountain range to his wanderlust, the library for his curiosity, and every sunrise or sunset that ever was or would ever be. With one look or the mere syllable of a word, she had the power to transform his mood, giving him flight even as his feet stayed on the ground. With a single touch, she could chain his inner dragon, or make him come even before he got hard. She was all the power in the universe coalesced into a living, breathing thing, the miracle that he had been granted in spite of the fact that he had long been undeserving of anything but his curse.

Mary Madonna Luce was the virgin Vishous had told him was coming for him—and she was more than enough to turn him into a God-fearing vampire.

On that note . . .

Rhage took off without waiting for the Go Now from his team. Rushing headlong across the field, he had both guns up in front of him and premium, high-test gas funneling into his leg muscles. And no, he didn’t have to hear the precise curses of frustration as he blew their cover and started the attack too soon.

He was used to the boys being pissed off at him.

And his demons were way harder to deal with than his brothers.

SAFE PLACE, MARY’S OFFICE

As Mary Madonna Luce hung up the phone, she kept her hand on the receiver’s smooth grip. Like a lot of the equipment and furnishings at Safe Place, the set was a decade old, a used AT&T leftover from some insurance company or maybe a real estate agent’s upgrade. Same with the desk. Her chair. Even the rug under her feet. At the vampire race’s only domestic violence shelter and resource for females and their children, every penny that came from the King’s generous coffers was spent on the people receiving support, treatment and rehabilitation.

Victims were allowed to come free of charge. And stay in the large, roomy house for however long they needed to.

Staffing, of course, was the largest expense . . . and with news like what had just come through that old phone, Mary was really fricking grateful for Marissa’s priorities.

“Fuck you, death,” she whispered. “Fuck you so goddamn hard.”

The squeak that her chair let out as she leaned back made her wince even though she was used to the complaint.

Looking up at the ceiling, she felt an overwhelming urge to take action, but the first rule of being a therapist was that you had to control your own emotions. Half-cocked and frantic did the patient no good, and contaminating an already stressful situation with drama that was self-infused on the part of the professional was utterly unacceptable.

If there had been time, she would have gone to one of the other social workers to get debriefed, re-centered and perma-composed. Given what was happening, though, all she could spare was a minute’s worth of Rhage’s patented deep breathing.

No, not the sexual kind.

More his yoga variety that had him inflating his lungs in three separate draws, holding the oxygen, and then releasing it all along with the tension in the muscles.

Or trying to release the tension.

Okay, this was getting her nowhere.

Mary rose to her feet and had to settle for two almost-theres in the composure department: one, she retucked her silk blouse and ran her fingers through her hair, which she was growing out; and two, she Halloween-masked her features, freezing everything into a semblance of concerned, warm, and not freaking out over her own past trauma.

When she stepped into the second-story hall, the scent of melting chocolate and baking sugar, butter and flour announced that Toll House Cookie Night was in full swing—and for an insane moment, she felt like popping open a bunch of windows and letting the cold October air scrub the smells out of the house.

The contrast between all that homey comfort and the hammer she was about to drop seemed disrespectful at best, one more part of the tragedy at worst.

Safe Place’s facilities had started out as a three-story, turn-of-the-twentieth-century roof-and-four-walls that had all the grace and distinction of a bread box. What it did have were bedrooms and bathrooms in abundance, a serviceable kitchen, and enough privacy so that the human world was never going to get tipped off that vampires were using the thing in their midst. And then came the expansion. After Tohr’s Wellsie died and he made a gift in her name to the facility, the Wellesandra Annex had been built by vampire craftsmen out back. Now, they had a community room, a second kitchen that was big enough for everyone to eat together in, and four more suites for additional females and their young.