“Tony,” he growled.
“Hey, Tony!” I shouted, leaning forward, and for a second the vampire was so startled that he forgot he was fighting me and looked right into my eyes. Which was exactly what I wanted. Keeping the eye contact, I dropped into the mindset that allowed me to create a mental connection between the two of us. It was sort of like opening your eyes inside a tunnel, and focusing on the light at the far end. Then I sort of willed myself into that light.
And just like that, I had him.
“Tony,” I said softly. There was no reason to yell at him now. He’d do anything I wanted. “Who sent you?”
Confusion erupted on his face. I knew the look—he wasn’t refusing to answer; he just didn’t understand my phrasing. Belatedly, I remembered that commands got better results than questions. “Tell me what happened at the Walrus tonight,” I said, pressing the demand into him.
“Darren and I came to hunt. We just wanted to feed.” His voice wasn’t defensive; it was toneless, as if he were talking in his sleep. “Then we couldn’t stop.”
Cold fear sparked in the back of my mind, but I had to stay focused or I would lose control of him. “Tell me who wanted you to come here tonight.”
Confusion again. “No one. We met at Darren’s apartment and decided where to go.”
I risked a quick glance at Maven. From past experience I knew I could look away without breaking the connection, but I didn’t dare do it for long. Maven was giving me nothing, just a slight furrow of her eyebrows that said she was as confused as I was.
Turning my attention back to Tony, I tried, “Explain why you couldn’t stop. Explain why you lost control.”
Tony’s eyes went distant for a moment, but the connection between us hadn’t broken. I could feel it. He just didn’t know how to respond. “I’m not sure what happened,” he said slowly, as though he were watching a video of the events and couldn’t quite interpret it. “Everything was intense tonight, deeper. Like I had a motor, and it’d just been souped-up.”
That sounded unpleasantly familiar. “Hang on for a second, Tony,” I said, though I kept my eyes on him. To Maven, I called out, “I’m not sure it was their fault. Something is driving them. Maybe the same thing that’s been causing . . . other events.”
“Kill him.”
Her voice was so cold and hard, I had to look up again. When I did, she was sitting on the edge of the bar, her bloodied bare legs dangling below her. The pool cue was now jutting up at an odd angle, and I realized it was sticking out of a desiccated corpse dressed in Darren’s clothes. She’d gotten the answer she needed. “They broke my laws. I can’t afford to be soft now,” Maven said coldly. “Kill him, Lex.”
“I can’t just—” I began, but I’d broken eye contact for too long. Tony began to buck and holler underneath me, trying to throw me off. I tried to open another connection, but he wasn’t having it, his eyes rolling wildly as he fought for leverage. Then all of a sudden his fingers shot up and planted themselves around my throat like it was magnetized.
“What did you do?” he whispered, horrified. “Get out of my brain, you stupid bi—”
The rest of the word was lost, as my shredder found his heart.
Chapter 17
When a vampire dies, the body rapidly decays, like time-lapse photography, until it catches up to where it would be if the vampire magic had never infected it. So a two hundred-year-old vampire would become brittle two hundred-year-old bones, and a three-month-old vampire would become a disgusting still-rotting corpse. I knew all that in theory, and I’d even seen it happen—but not while I was sitting on top of the corpse.
Right underneath me, Tony’s body immediately began to desiccate, growing softer and sort of slippery, like his skin was loose underneath his clothes. I scrambled to get off, but I slipped on the bloated skin, catching myself about two inches away from his rotting face. I screeched and leaped to my feet, and for a few seconds I turned into a complete and total girl, shuddering and squirming around while I chanted “Ew, ew, ew!”
Finally the revulsion passed, and I collapsed into a nearby chair, desperately wanting to shower in antibacterial gel. By the time Maven had hopped off the bar and sauntered over, Tony’s body looked like a weathered skeleton. She dropped into the chair next to mine, and we sat there silently for a long moment.
“You didn’t have to kill them,” I said softly. I knew exactly how she’d respond, but I also needed to hear myself say those words out loud.
“Yes, I did.”
Behind us, I could hear Quinn pressing the minds of the human bar patrons one by one and sending them out the back door. He was telling each of them they’d witnessed an ugly bar fight and just wanted to go home now.
“What about the bodies?” I mumbled, gesturing to the dead humans scattered around the bar.
“Oh, we’ll make up a story,” Maven replied. She sounded utterly unconcerned with covering her tracks. “One of them went on a killing spree, or maybe we’ll just start a fire. We’ve done it before.”
I just nodded, too numb to be outraged. “Could you make it an accident?” I implored, feeling like a child. “So none of them have to be remembered as a killer?”
Her face didn’t change. “Sure.”
“Thank you.” We sat quietly for a moment. I looked at my hands. There was blood on them, from when I’d rolled around during the fight. It wasn’t just my hands, though: my leather jacket. My jeans. My sneakers. Nothing was really saturated, but the red stains were all over me, like I’d rolled against a freshly painted wall. There was probably still a little dried blood in my hair from the night before, too. My back hurt where I’d hit the table, and my shoulder from when I’d clotheslined the guy. Mostly, though, I wanted a shower so bad.