I’d been frozen in a trance, and Jack dragged me away. When I noticed it, I managed to look away, and the way my lungs burned reminded to breathe.

The crowd broke, and the light shifted from blue to dull red. We slipped through a doorway into the next room. The walls dampened sound of music.

This room was smaller than the last and dressed more like a bar or a coffee shop than a club. Lots of doors and darkened hallways led out of it. Soft couches filled the room.

A small bar sat in a dark corner with a bartender behind it. There weren’t any bottles lining the wall, and I figured it had to be an entirely different kind of bar.

On the couch nearest to us, a stunningly beautiful woman laid with her head lulled back. Her clothing was black leather and so tight I couldn’t believe she could move. A pretty young girl was curled up on her lap. Her eyes were closed, and a thin line of blood trailed down her neck. The vampire holding her looked at me and smiled as she licked the blood from her lips.

“Stop it,” Jack murmured in my ear.

“What?” I asked, pulling my attention from the vampire to look about the room.

Scenes similar to the one on the couch played out all over. Some people (or vampires) were simply sitting and talking, and some were just making out. But others were openly feeding on humans.

As soon as we entered the room, everyone seemed to turn and look at us. Vampires with their stunning, entrancing eyes, kept fixing their gaze on me, and I would forget to breathe.

“Stop,” Jack repeated and jerked my hand so I would focus on him.

“What?” I looked up at him, away from everyone in the room.

“Don’t look at anyone,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You keep letting them… captivate you.” He looked over the top of my head, and he was starting to think that maybe this was a bad idea. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to fix that.

“Don’t be sorry. Just…” He shook his head. “Come on.” He pulled me off to the side of the room, to a mostly empty couch.

When he sat down, I sat close to him. On the other side of him was a girl with hair that shown purple under the light, and her lipstick was black. She’d been sipping something out of a tall wine glass, and she turned her attention to us.

She smiled, mostly at me, and her fangs were more pronounced than Jack’s were. Almost comically so, and I wondered if that was a natural occurrence or if she did something to make them like that.

“You’re new here,” she purred, directly to me, and her voice sounded like honey and helium.

“Yeah,” I said, and Jack dropped his arm around me.

“You, I’ve seen around before.” She narrowed her eyes at him. Her makeup was so thick and heavy around her eyes, as if she wore a kind of mask. She bit her lip, carefully so the fangs wouldn’t tear her skin, and tried to place him. “Did we fuck?”

“No, I can’t say that we have,” Jack replied quickly. I tensed up, which I knew was a bad idea since I was supposed to keep my heart rate down.

It never occurred to me that Jack had sex. I realized that vampires probably had sex, that Mae and Ezra did, and I definitely considered the prospect of me having sex with Jack, but I had never thought about it actually happening. Not only had Jack most likely bitten girls here, he had probably slept with some of them.

“Pity,” the girl said, and her eyes dropped back to me. Her smile tilted, and she noticed the change in my heart rate. “So you’re that kind of girl.”

“What kind of girl is that?” I asked tightly.

“Where are my manners?” She laughed, a tinkley, fragile sound, like breaking glass. “I haven’t even introduced myself. My name is Violet.”

She held out her hand to me and only me. It was covered in one of those lace fingerless gloves that Madonna used to wear, and I took her hand and shook it.

“I’m Alice.” I let go of her lacy, tepid hand and looked up at Jack. “This is Jack.”

“Jack.” She clicked her tongue and looked at him. “We never-”

“Nope,” he repeated with an edge to his voice.

“Are you sure?” Violet looked dubious. “Cause I have a really excellent memory, and I could swear that we knocked boots?” She winked at me and elbowed Jack playfully in the ribs.

“I’m quite certain,” he said icily.

“Yeah! You did this thing-”

“Stop,” Jack told her, his voice low and even. “I know what you’re doing, and I want you to stop.” She batted her eyes innocently, and he turned to me. “When she mentioned it the first time, your heart sped up, and now she’s just saying things to make it race. She’s trying to set you off.”

“It’s beating like a moth caught in jar,” Violet smiled wistfully at me. “I can’t help myself. It sounds so beautiful.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Jack reassured me quietly.

Blushing, I curled up closer to him. Even in the dimly lit room, I could see the way Violet looked at me with pure thirst in her eyes. Jack would never let anything happen to me, and I don’t think she wanted to kill me. But she wanted to taste me, and that was a weird thing to know.

“Are you gonna go back to one of the rooms?” She nodded toward the dark doorways that led out of the room, and I wondered what kind of rooms they were. “I would kill just to watch.”