Her head, her neck, arms and legs, were all leaden, too heavy to so much as twitch. She opened her mouth to scream, but even her lips were paralyzed.
The demon grunted, then gurgled, calling one of his cohorts forth from working over Elan. As the second creature moved closer, the faint psychic picture that had been worrying the corner of Alyssa’s brain came into focus.
Blood. Heart. Brain. Eyes. Tongue.
And the last was repeated over and over. Alyssa saw herself, lying on the ground, her jaw slack, a sweeping trail of stolen blood flowing from her mouth. Her tongue was missing.
One of the demons dragged a yellowed claw down her cheek, almost reverently. Alyssa wanted to draw breath, to fuel the scream she so desperately needed. But her body was not her own anymore. She was truly a corpse now.
Blood. Heart. Brain. Eyes. Tongue.
As the picture of her bloodied form grew stronger, sharper, Alyssa felt her strength waning. She was fading. The anesthetizing charm of the demons’ breath opened her brain wide open to them, and them to her. She focused on the stars, the clean white light radiating from their centers, and gathered the energy she had left.
“Get…” her brain whimpered. The creatures hunched closer. The third joined them at her side, tucking some sort of alabaster jar into a pouch on its belt.
“Good,” the third demon crooned. “Good.”
Alyssa tried again. “Get…”
The third demon hovered above her face, pulling her lips apart with its rough, calloused paws.
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” Alyssa howled inside her head, and the psychic force of it lifted her off the ground so that only her fingers and feet scraped the dirt.
The creatures howled, dropping to their knees beside her, clutching their ears with their paws. Alyssa slumped to the ground, exhausted. Her eyelids grew heavy and she could just barely make out the starlight under her lashes. She felt movement at her side, and not from the demons. This was fast, agile, familiar.
She blinked, finally able to turn her head a fraction, and saw Javier standing over her. He held a silver broadsword aloft and brought it singing down. Alyssa’s lips twitched in befuddled amusement. You just never knew what Javier had secreted away in that coat. The sword might have lopped the head off the trio’s leader, if it hadn't passed right through it. The roiling black shadow reacted to the silver, however, hissing and popping like bacon grease over the creature's hoarse bellows. The creatures scrambled away from Javier, casting longing looks at Alyssa before disappearing into the darkness.
Alyssa lifted her head from the ground. “Javier?”
“Heard you from a mile away, mon cher.”
“Elan?”
Javier winked at her, touched his fingertips to her forehead and murmured, “Sleep.”
The sky, the stars, everything, faded to black.
Alyssa woke up in an overdone, over-decorated suite of rooms that could only belong to Javier. She was lying on burgundy silk sheets, with her head propped on a mountain of pillows. Javier was an admitted pillow-whore.
“You know, for all your puritan sensibilities, an evening out with you is never boring, Alyssa,” Javier’s voice sounded from the bedroom door. He was leaning against the frame, smirking at her. And oddly, the familiarity of that smirk made her feel better. “Now, can you tell me what that was all about?”
“My tongue,” she rasped. “They wanted my tongue.”
Javier mused, “Well, if they were going to take a tongue, it makes sense they’d want one as sharp as yours.”
She raised her hand, stretching the fingers into an obscene gesture.
“That’s my delicate flower,” Javier snorted.
Alyssa sagged back against the pillows and Javier disappeared into the hallway. He returned moments later and draped a lovely, unconscious teenage girl across Alyssa’s lap. Humming a soothing little tune, Javier arranged the women’s bodies into a more comfortable feeding position and pressed the teen’s wrist to Alyssa’s mouth.
She didn’t need vampire senses to smell that this girl soused to the gills.
“She’s perfect. Nicely marinated,” he insisted, pulling up the girl’s sleeves. The girls arms bore several bite marks. “And obviously, she’s been a willing donor for someone. It might as well be you.”
The candy sweetness of the girl’s perfume, the delicate staccato of her pulse beneath that perfect, creamy skin, had Alyssa’s fangs stretching forward.
“No,” she murmured, pushing the arm away from her mouth.
“Just pretend you’re a normal, functional creature of the darkness for just one night and drink,” Javier hissed in a tone of voice she didn’t recognize from her blasé, chronically bored friend. “It wasn’t exactly easy to find a candidate this close to sunrise, you know. Now drink. You’re going to need it.”
Reluctantly, Alyssa pressed her fangs against the girl’s wrist and delicately broke the skin. The explosion of life on her tongue made her moan. Pure, sweet, uncomplicated. Nothing could beat the blood of a nice young virgin. Some smart vampire had cultivated this little one, kept her unsullied, so they might enjoy her again and again. Unfortunately, that vampire hadn’t taught her the value of abstaining from liquor.
“They wanted my tongue,” Alyssa said again, between long, deep swallows of the girl’s blood. She only had two, three more pulls before she took too much. And then, she’d faced either finishing the girl off or turning her. Neither was a particularly palatable option.
Alyssa took one last long drink and gently rolled the girl’s sleeping form onto the edge of the mattress.
Alyssa sat up slowly, her head still ringing. “They were going to take my tongue. In their heads, I saw it over and over. Blood, heart, brain, eyes, tongue. I don’t know why they- Heart. They took his heart! Elan, where is he?”
Javier refused to meet her gaze.
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