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Taking his time, he pulled the longer katana from its scabbard as well and advanced on her across a thick, blood-red rug. She didn’t even flinch as he snapped the katana’s tip against her neck and held the other blade in position to catch any attack she might mount, any movement she might make away from the humans. With a low growl, he said, “You do not threaten me and my family and expect to live.”

Bijou touched one fingertip to the razor-sharp edge. It came away with a minor cut, which she licked with care. Her eyes smoldered, as did her words. “I hope you realize that the reverse is also true.”

An instant later, she was gone.

The human woman who found her breasts at the end of his sword grew round-eyed with shock. He fought to subdue his own disorientation. He had seen little more than a ripple of Bijou’s movement and no sense of direction. So she still had her hooks deep enough in him to addle his perceptions. Not even the two-thousand-year-old Roman he battled last summer had been this fast.

“You seem to forget that you belong to me,” Bijou said, all pretense at seduction and condescension stripped from her inhuman voice.

He spun to face her. “Never.”

She stood behind the butchered settee, her hands out of view, holding something that clinked and rattled. “We all belong to someone, Dominique. The sooner you accept this, the better for everyone.”

A chill prickled the back of his neck before he even knew why. His name. She had used it the first time they met—but he had never told her what it was. Something monumental was happening here, something just beyond his awareness. He stood at the edge of an invisible chasm. One step in the wrong direction and he would plunge in.

Or maybe he was already falling.

With a powerful, lightning-fast movement, Bijou tossed a hailstorm into the air. He barely had time to recognize the sound as chains before they snapped outward and vanished into a whirling shroud of steel. They droned around her as she moved, hands and arms blurring. The ends must have been weighted and sharpened; where they collided with lamps and furniture, glass exploded, wood splintered and fabric ripped.

Dominique had never seen anything like it, but he wasn’t about to run into it with nothing but a pair of swords. He took several steps back. She lunged, and the chains leapt at him. First one sword, then the other tore from his hands. Something whistled past his face. He heard the crunch of bone and tasted blood on the back of his tongue. His vision blurred with the pain of a shattered nose.

He staggered back until his legs collided with the bed and he tumbled in. Four of the vintages scrambled away. The fifth lay pinned beneath him—the girl whose life he had spared by not taking his one and only chance to destroy Bijou.

He rolled to the side, taking her with him. Her panic-stricken face stared into his. Her eyes were sky blue, only a little lighter than Cassidy’s, and he fell into them, reaching desperately for his anchor, his sanity, his strength.

The back of her head exploded in a plume of gore.

Fear colder than ice shot through him as the dead girl collapsed by his side. Not her. Not Cassidy.

But it could have been.

It would be.

If he didn’t stop Bijou now.

Right now.

The beast’s rage closed its claws around him. Nothing mattered but destroying this monster. He gathered the only weapon that remained to him—the preternatural power of his own terror—and flew at Bijou. Sunrise would find her in bloody pieces, even if he lay dismembered beside her.

She darted out of his way. The chains snapped and hissed ever faster. He ducked and leapt, feinted to the right, dove to the left, away, then close. Bijou moved so fast, he saw her arms and legs only as ghostly flickers.

The next weight to find its mark, like a high-caliber bullet, broke an arm. The one after that caved in the side of his ribcage and punctured a lung. As he doubled over, the chains whipped around him with crushing force. He fell, hobbled, to the ground, mindless with wrath and pain, all his limbs lashed tight.

She rolled him on his back with one small foot and fell on him. Jerking back his head by a fistful of hair, she drove her teeth into his jugular. A second later, her serum delivered a walloping punch to his mind. She released him and wiped her mouth with the back of a hand. “Stupid child.”

He stared at her through the eyes of the beast, aware of nothing but the clicking crunch of his bones knitting back together. Only when she glanced away, her attention captured by he-cared-not-what, did he react. He snapped upright, ignoring the chains that cut deep into his flesh, and in the same motion slammed his fangs into her throat so hard she toppled sideways. He stayed with her, biting down, ferociously grabbing onto the muscle and sinew.

Her blood burst into his mouth, thick and redolent with outrage and the flavor of dense, dark forests. Seven or eight centuries, he guessed. Perhaps a millennium.

He reached for the truth she concealed from him, only to sense her mind disappear like smoke in a wind, allowing him nothing. An instant later, she shook him off and backhanded him hard enough to make his brain slosh inside his skull. Then she stood over him and shrieked, incoherent with black-eyed fury.

Dominique pulled his bloodied lips into a feeble smile.

Two heartbeats later, she had hurled him out into the night. As he flew, he spun out of his ties as Bijou whipped the ends of the chains. Neptune, god of the deep, awaited him with his trident in the backyard pool. Dominique went straight to the bottom and lay there, staring at the fierce, bearded face rendered in tiny mosaic stones. Two smaller splashes, and his swords drifted down to lie beside him.

His head and his world continued to spin. Disoriented, he stared at Neptune’s face, the only still point. It reminded him of Serge and the lunatic pirate’s babbling of grand destinies. What would the oracle have to say about this dubious turn of events? Not that it mattered.

As his body healed, the dazed fog slowly lifted from his mind. He had been bested. He should be dead. As unprepared as he was for Bijou’s true age and power, he should have been an easy kill for her. In fact, she should be coming after him even now. Why didn’t she? Why did she toy with him? A frisson of unease rippled over his shoulders, but he pushed it away. He still lived, his serum swam in her blood, and he knew more about her now than he did before. Next time, his odds would be better.