He was already bleeding. I didn’t have to kill him. There was nothing I could do to secure his release—not from a whole lair of vampires who all knew more about what they were and how to handle themselves than I could even guess at.

At least, that was what I told myself as I walked, gait stilted and made awkward by the mixed signals of my desires, toward the man. He might have been handsome once, when he was groomed and smelled of cologne instead of fear, but now he was little more than a pathetic hunk of terrified meat. A blood bag.

I lifted his wrist to my lips and tore the gash there a little wider, breaking the clots that had begun to form and releasing ambrosia into my eager mouth. It flowed down my throat, easily, like I didn’t even have to swallow, but I did anyway because it brought the power, the energy, the life into me that much faster.

I thought of the cocaine I had tried once in college, and would have laughed if I could have done so without taking my mouth away.

This was better.