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“He’ll be dead soon enough,” Slim clarified with little fanfare.

Samantha’s surprised gasp drowned in a shriek of supernatural fury. Her human eyes couldn’t comprehend what was happening until the glass door beside her blew in and something cannonballed into the room, taking the curtains with it. Étienne yanked her back and shoved her behind him just as the curtain rod came down, narrowly missing her head.

The cannonball turned out to be Slim. The skinny vampire hit the wall so hard, he shattered the artwork that hung there and bounced off. Like a cat, he landed in a crouch. His eyes flashed to full black, and the rest of him…the rest of him compacted into the skeletal form of a vampire at his most dangerous.

“Mon Dieu,” Étienne whispered.

The vampire didn’t even glance at them before he blurred back out the door, snarling like a thing straight out of hell. Apparently, Natalia had surprised them with her attack. She still had Dominique’s blood in her system, lending her strength a vampire her age should not possess—and then some.

By the time Samantha and Étienne caught sight of her again, she had joined the ranks of things straight out of hell. A naked, snowy white figure carved of skin and bone, she had just swung around and driven a makeshift stake through Slim. The vampire doubled over around the business end of a palm frond protruding from his belly. That wasn’t going to kill him, though—just slow him down long enough for Natalia to rip off his head with a loud, wet crack.

For a breathless moment, she stood over her kill, her platinum hair a damp mane around her head and shoulders. The head dangled by its jaw from her fingers, and her eyes burned bright in her blood-spattered skull face.

Ryan still sat tied to the chair with invisible tethers and stared at her in adoring wonder. “Natalia, my love.”

She turned to him, to the love shining on his face, and never saw the brute coming. One moment she was whole, the next her head was gone. A fountain of blood exploded from her neck. Her body crumpled. Before she hit the ground, her killer shoved her over into the bubbling hot-tub with a vehement snarl. “Bitch!”

Samantha startled so badly she almost knocked over Étienne. Her heart flopped. Her breath hitched.

Her thoughts flat-lined.

Ryan screamed like an animal writhing on a spear.

Brute looked down at his cohort’s sprawling carcass. “God damn bitch!”

With a series of grating thumps, Ryan hopped the patio chair across the pavers toward the vampire. He all but foamed with rage as he promised to rip the supernatural menace to pieces.

“Oh, no,” Samantha murmured when she saw the menace turn to the human. “Oh, no, no, no.” Before she knew what she was doing, she was out the door and running. Somewhere between the door and the bloody scene, her usual Zen self evaporated. In its place appeared an unrecognizable alien, a she-demon. “Get the fuck away from him!” she barked. “Harming those who are under the protection of the Lord of Night is a capital offense!”

Ryan stopped hopping the chair. Now he just sat and wailed.

Brute eyed her. Or rather, he leered at her. “Oh, is it now?” he cooed. “Then I guess I’ll just have to go on offending.”

Étienne suddenly jumped in front of her, hunched forward, arms wide, moving on the balls of his feet. “Do not compound your error beyond all hope of forgiveness,” he warned. “We are your lord’s family. Touch us and nothing can save you.”

The vampire released his beast.

The terror that gripped Samantha’s chest and turned her bowels to water was mercilessly swift.

Étienne grabbed a patio chair and brandished the legs toward the black-eyed, fanged, skeletal nightmare. “Samantha, run!”

She didn’t. She knew there was no point. Plus, her legs had stopped working. In fact, they wobbled beneath her.

From out of nowhere, an arm flashed around the brute’s massive trunk, pulling him back into a sharp arch even as a curly-haired head appeared and drove home a set of fearsome fangs. Within seconds, Brute became still and only stared, unseeing, into the sky.

When Serge had drunk his fill and pillaged the mind for all it could give, he severed the meaty head from the shoulders with a single blow of his hand. The head sailed off into the night in a pinwheel of blood. The body dropped into the carnage at his bare feet.

Samantha staggered. Her legs seemed to have disappeared. Étienne saved her from a crash to the ground by wrapping his arms around her. “It’s over. They are gone,” he said. “They’re gone. You’re safe.”

She clung to him like a shipwrecked sailor to the only piece of flotsam in a heaving sea. Vomit seared the back of her throat. Her whole body shook from fear, adrenaline, and shock. She didn’t look at Serge directly, but she saw him from the corner of her eye, heard him tell Ryan that he was free of every compulsion ever put on him.

The man fell forward out of his prison chair into the blood on the stones. On all fours, he scurried to the hot-tub and its grisly contents. There, he collapsed and howled with horror and grief.

Serge watched him for a long moment, tilting his head in that way he had when he saw futures dance in auras. When he turned away from Ryan, his face was empty, mask-like. Samantha could almost feel his unfocused gaze on her, searching her aura and perhaps Étienne’s. Étienne who held her so tightly he seemed to be the only thing keeping her physically together.

From one moment to the next, Serge disappeared. But his parting words hung in the air. “All is as it must be.”

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