Soft words filled the air in the gym. I didn’t understand a single one, but I knew Grégoire was cursing fluently under his breath, the syllables French-sounding, and Leo was whispering back in the same language. I heard a faint snicking sound and the Master of the City lifted his wrist, biting the flesh on the inside of his own lower arm. Blood rolled out and Leo placed the wound to Grégoire’s lips, cradling his friend’s head with his palm. Grégoire sealed his lips around the bite and sucked.

Bethany appeared with a small pop of air and settled to the floor with them. The priestess extended her fangs and bit into Grégoire’s arm near the brachial artery. Her hair, as always, was knotted and twisted into locks, worked with hundreds of gold and stone beads, the mass pulled to the nape of her neck, hiding her ears, but showing the many hoops and studs that hung there. Bethany Salazar y Medina was African. Unlike most vamps, whose skin paled after long years without the sun, her flesh had remained blue black, her lips like storm clouds at night. Her sclera were brownish, her irises blacker than that dark, stormy night. As she sucked, she lifted her head to me and stared.

Bethany was crazy, and not in a fun, party-girl kinda way. Bethany was scary. I took a step back as her power began to rise and tingle across my skin like needles. She poured her magic into Grégoire, healing magic that the others didn’t seem to feel, dancing on their skin, nearly as much as I did.

A small crowd had begun to gather, standing apart from me, except for Eli, and no one was looking at us. Eli murmured, “How badly are you hurt?” I turned from Bethany to him and then looked down, where his eyes rested on my bloody clothes.

“I don’t know.” I looked back to my opponent and Leo and the priestess. It occurred to me that she was around an awful lot lately. Or, rather, that she lived here and I was the one who was around a lot lately. I wondered who she was feeding off of to keep her relatively sane. I was pretty sure it used to be Bruiser. I shook my head to clear it of the effects of her magics, and took yet another step away. “How bad is Grégoire hurt?”

“He’s undead. How bad can it be?”

I spluttered with laughter that I turned into a cough as Eli took my elbow and led me from the room, to a small windowless space just off the women’s locker room. It was about ten by twelve, with two small sofas, two small chairs, and tiny tables covered with magazines. I had never been in it. Eli had been exploring, which was good. We needed to know this place much better than we now did. The room looked like a waiting area off a surgery suite, or off a courtroom, with dull brown and blue plaid stain-resistant furniture and industrial carpet. Eli quickly loosened his own white gear and then started helping me to remove mine.

I was hurt quite a bit worse than I had thought, with the skin sliced deeply into the muscle beneath, and the clotting blood sealing itself to the fabric over the wounds. There had been no pain until I saw gashes, and then they started throbbing, a steady, pounding misery. I sat down fast, onto the unyielding surface of the hard sofa. Eli slipped out of the room, and with him gone, I pushed on the cut along the bottom of my ribs. Lightning pain flashed along my nerves and the breath I took sounded like a string of S’s. Blood flooded out across my side and belly, under my ruined undershirt.

From the hallway, I heard Eli say to someone, “Ask him to come now.” Closing the door softly behind him, Eli reentered, carrying a basket of rolled towels. He pressed one to the newly opened wound. Quietly, he asked, “Do you need to shift? Do you have time?”

“No. I don’t want to do that again. Not here. Not ever. Not near—” I stopped.

“Not near fangheads. Especially not near Leo. Who wants to own you enough anyway, without making him more covetous of you.”

My eyes found his face and I shuddered with a tiny laugh. He understood. Without my telling him, Eli understood. “Yeah. That.”

“I’ve asked Edmund to help. Okay?”

I nodded. Edmund Hartley had healed me before, and the unassuming but powerful vamp had been good. And helpful. And hadn’t tried to roll me with compulsion. I heard a knock and Edmund entered. He was five foot seven or eight, brown haired, hazel eyed, and he seemed kind, nonthreatening. Mild-mannered was a good term for him, until he turned up the vamp-o-meter.

He might look like a pushover, but Edmund was old and powerful. As he closed the door behind him, I could feel his power as he pulled it up and around himself, icy prickles, like spikes of frozen air. Yet, despite his dazzling magics, now lifting the hairs along the back of my neck, he’d lost blood-master status of Clan Laurent—a story I thought had a lot more going on than had been reported—to a vamp named Bettina and ended up as a slave to Leo for the next twenty years. When vamps lost, they lost big.

“I smell your blood. Again,” he said. Eli stepped aside and Edmund knelt near me. He breathed in and held the scent of my blood the way a wine connoisseur might inhale the perfume of a really good vintage. When he exhaled he said, “I heard about the sparring match. No one mentioned that you had been injured as well.”

“Isn’t that just like the fangheads?”

Edmund smiled at the insult and leaned close to my side. I felt his cold breath against my skin. “Your clothing must come away,” he said, sadly. “Fast or slow?”

“Do it.”

Edmund didn’t give me a chance to change my mind. He gripped the hem of my undershirt in both hands and yanked. It ripped up the middle and out of the wounds. I hissed with pain and said something I didn’t usually. Eli chuckled and I speared him with a look just as Edmund put his mouth onto my side and his chill tongue slicked the blood away. Heat followed in its wake, heat that danced along my nerves and then dove deep inside as his tongue delved into the cut.

I closed my eyes and steeled my face to show nothing. Absolutely nothing. I worked to keep my breathing steady and slow, and managed to keep my heart rate slower than a speeding bullet. Maybe. For about half a minute. And then the heat ricocheted out of the slice and right to my core. I knew it was bad when Eli left the room. “Coward,” I hissed to his retreating back. And then moaned as the healing energies bent my head back and arched up my spine. Healing and desire, two halves of vamp magic.

Edmund laughed gently against my flesh; the vibrations of his laughter rebounded through me, and his arms circled my waist, pulling me against his body. I felt another moan rising and swallowed it down. No way was I gonna moan again. Not. Gonna. Happen.