Damian hugged me, burying his face in my hair. I hugged him back, my face pressed against chest. Nicky made a soft whistle. I turned in Damian’s arms so I could see the screen.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Just keep looking at it, your eyes will make sense of it.”

Damian put his hand in front of my face so I couldn’t see. “And then you’ll never be able to not see it.”

“Damian, move your hand.”

“I have to do it, because you ordered me, but don’t look, Anita.” He moved his hand, and I looked.

Nicky was right, my mind did see it eventually, and Damian was right, too. It was one of those images that once you see it you’ll remember it. I’d seen cut-up bodies in person, but it was still gruesome even by my standards.

“Does she have a file of this kind of thing?” I asked.

He hit more buttons. He started opening files and all the pictures were like that. Images from actual war casualties, crime scene photos that had made it onto the World Wide Web, bondage images, but only ones that were serial-killer bad. Image after image flickered across the screen.

“It’s all like this,” Nicky said. “Even I have pictures of other things; women, weapons, online cartoons. There’s nothing but this on here.”

“You should kill her,” Damian said.

We were both standing behind Nicky, staring at the screen. I noticed that Damian’s eyes had gone back to their normal green. Mine felt back to normal, too.

“She hasn’t done anything here to earn an execution, Damian.”

“I didn’t say execute her, I said kill her. The baby vampires always go mad, Anita. I don’t know any as young as her that didn’t have to be put down.”

“Put down? You make her sound like a rabid dog. She’s not an animal.”

He motioned at the screen. “Yes, she is. She looks like a little girl, but that’s what’s inside her head. That’s all that’s inside her head. Eventually, she’s going to find a way to make what’s inside her come outside, and then people are going to get hurt.”

“I like Little V, but he’s right, Anita. The fact that she’s been able to control herself this long is impressive, but the pressure is building up. Eventually, she won’t be able to stop herself.”

“So you agree with Damian we should kill her?”

He nodded. “You can do it now, or you can do it after she’s cut someone up, but eventually one of us will have to do it. She talked to me about what she wanted to do to someone, and trust me, it’s all she really thinks about. I think the longer she can’t act on the urge in smaller ways, the bigger the urge gets, the more it’s going to take to quench her . . . bloodlust.”

“I can’t kill her for something she hasn’t done,” I said.

“Like you couldn’t let me kill Haven for you, because you felt sorry for mind-fucking me and not fucking Haven enough.”

I glared at him. “Thanks, that makes me feel so much better.”

“Either you need to send Little V to another master who will let her hurt people, or you need to kill her to make sure she doesn’t hurt any of your people. But either with permission or without, eventually she’s going to do this to someone.”

“I saw what she could do to people, Anita,” Damian said.

“We can’t kill her for what she might do,” I said.

Nicky hit some more buttons and the images began to cycle on the screen one bloody mess, one frightened tied-up person after another. “She was sitting in the dark looking at this, Anita. The only real question is, was she just watching, or was she masturbating to it?”

I stared at him instead of the computer. “That’s . . . that’s sick. That’s . . . I did not want to think that, or know that. Fuck, Nicky, why . . .”

“I want you to understand, Anita, this is her passion. I wasn’t joking. This is either sex for her, or as close as she comes.”

“Turn it off,” I said.

“You’re not going to kill her because you feel sorry for her. Nathaniel talks to her, too, Anita. They don’t talk about the same things. He’s a bottom to her top, but he lets her talk about hurting him. He lets her talk some of her fantasies out with him, because he understands that she only looks like a kid. What would you do if she got Nathaniel alone? What would you do if she did that to him?”

“Don’t do this,” I said.

“I like Nathaniel, and it would kill you if something happened to him. Regrets are about decisions that you know you should have done different. Don’t make this one of them.”

“I can’t kill her for what she might do, Nicky.”

“I could,” he said.

“You like her,” I said.

“Yeah, and I understand her better than you do. Anita, if you hadn’t mind-fucked me into a Bride I wouldn’t be trustworthy around your people, either. I’m not a sexual sadist. I don’t need pain or fear to enjoy sex, but I enjoyed having power over people. The hurting was more about taking pride in my skill at it and getting information out of people. I got off on breaking the strong until they were weak. That was my kick, but everyone breaks, Anita. If you have the skills and enough time there’s no such thing as someone who won’t break.”

“And you had the skills,” I said.

He shrugged as much as the muscles of his upper body would let him. “Yeah, I did, but she’s better. Do you understand me, Anita? Little V is better, because she’s spent the last eight hundred years practicing.”

“Anita,” Damian said, and he touched my shoulders, making me look at him, as Jean-Claude had earlier, “you know how they say practice makes perfect?”

“Yes,” I said, but that one word was barely a whisper.

“Valentina is perfect.”

31

I MADE THEM shut up about Valentina, but the thought that Nathaniel had been letting her whisper serial-killer fantasies in his ear to let off some of her pressure was almost more than I could handle for the day. I wanted to scream at them both that I didn’t need this today. That we had enough problems without borrowing. If Valentina hurt him, I would kill her, but killing her after the damage was done would be cold comfort.

But once the video started, none of us were worried about what Valentina might do in the future. We were too worried about what some other vampires had done last night. We sat in the three computer chairs we dragged up in front of the big flat-screen monitor and watched the horror show in nice HD color. Some things are not meant for high-definition detail. It just makes it worse. The vampire’s lair was underground, down a short flight of stone steps. There seemed to be moisture seeping down some of the walls. The first body was at the foot of the stairs with some natural sunlight filtering down from higher up the stairs. The first bodies were obvious vampire victims with neat bite marks at both sides of the throat, wrist, bend of the elbow, inner thigh, bend of the knee. The only thing that made the bites bad was that there were too many of them. No human being could feed that many vampires in one night and live.

“It’s the same number of bites as you and some of the other wereanimals have,” Nicky said. “Why aren’t we dead?”

“Wereanimals are harder to kill, for one thing,” I said, as we watched more bodies simply lying against the walls or in the middle of the tunnel. They lay as they’d fallen. No one had taken any time to reposition the bodies. They’d killed them and left them for the next victim.

“They meant to drain these people dry,” Damian said. He’d gone very still beside me. I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t sure how I’d feel about him touching me while we watched this, or if the sight of all the bites excited him and he didn’t want me to know.

“Why aren’t we dead, again?” Nicky asked.

“Jean-Claude used the ardeur to keep feeding us all energy so that the Lover of Death couldn’t feed off our deaths,” I said.

“The bites are getting messier,” Damian said in a voice as still as his body in the chair beside mine.