Page 25 of Taste of Forever (Vampires of Sanguine #3)

The tunnel emptied into a room maybe ten times the size of the one the old Marrower was in.

It was carved out into a rough oval shape like an egg.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were still packed dirt, but high-powered lights pointed at a large hexagonal cage in the center.

The cage was closed at the top, with the intersecting wires pressing into the dirt ceiling above.

Dozens, maybe close to a hundred people crowded around the cage. There were typical vampires, Marrowers, dragon shifters, brusang, and even some humans from what I could tell.

“Let’s go to the betting table.” Cyan made a sharp left while I was still reeling from the brightness of the lights.

I followed him, deciding to light up some darakt to take the edge off my nerves. There was plenty of red smoke hanging over the crowd, so I might as well blend in. Cyan was already making friends by the time I caught up to him.

“How’s it going?” He grinned at the two yellow-eyed vampires manning the table. They were already high on drae and it wasn’t even midnight. “Any chance I can see the odds for each of the fighters?”

The addicts looked at each other before glancing back at him. “What, you don’t got a favorite?”

Cyan shrugged. “I like to be strategic about winning a shitload of money.”

One of the vampires rifled through some papers before sliding over a single sheet. Cy picked up and leaned toward me as he examined it.

“There’s no names,” he muttered. “Only numbers. I wonder if they’re all prisoners.”

“I don’t even know how to interpret this,” I admitted. It all looked like a bunch of random digits to me.

“These are the fight match-ups.” Cyan pointed to the first two columns.

“And these are the odds. So for example, number 7079 is favored fifty-two percent over number 9163. They’re pretty evenly matched.

But number 5406 is favored eighty-nine percent over 8052.

Whoever that 5406 guy is, he’s a beast. Or at least popular with the betting crowd.

” He slapped the sheet down on the table and took out his wad of money. “Let me put a thousand on number 8052.”

The vampire at the table stared up at him. “Why? You like losing money?”

Cy shrugged. “I like betting on an underdog.” He placed his bet and we weaved through the crowd, making our way closer to one of the five sides of the cage.

“How many fights are there going to be?” I wondered.

“There were ten match-ups on the sheet,” Cyan said, then nodded at the fresh blood on the cage floor. “Looks like a few have already happened.”

A Marrower entered the cage with a metal bucket, which he used to throw water onto the bloodied floor. The half-hearted cleaning attempt barely did anything but spread the blood further out.

“Hey.” I nudged another vampire beside me. “How many fights have there been already?”

The guy blinked slowly, his eyes bloodshot and yellowed with draitrium use. Great. He counted on his fingers. “Four, I think.”

“Cool, thanks.”

He wiped his eyes and sniffed before pulling an amber glass bottle out of pocket. “Want some? Twenty bucks a drop.”

“No thanks, I’m good.”

“You sure? It’s the good shit. Twenty per is a steal.”

Judging from the broken capillaries in his eyes and the way he kept rubbing them, I’d bet he got ripped off on a bad batch. Maybe the draitrium was cut with something else to increase the dealer’s profits.

“I’m sure. Maybe grab some Visine, buddy. Your eyes don’t look too good.”

“Fuck off,” he growled before disappearing into the crowd.

“Such a fucking waste,” Cyan griped at my side. “This group over here’s talking about staying up to watch the sunrise after the fights. Can you imagine?”

“I know,” I commiserated. Daytime wasn’t our world.

Watching sunrises was not in a vampire’s nature.

Even while on drae, it was incredibly risky to be out while the sun was up.

Most draitrium-related deaths weren’t actually due to overdoses, but misjudging how long the sun protected lasted, then getting burned up while caught outside with no protection.

The surrounding lights shut off and the crowd let out a collective roar. Only the cage remained illuminated. Cyan and I shared a grim look. The next fight was about to start.

About ten feet away from us, the crowd parted to form a lane. I was tall enough to see over most people’s heads, and spotted three figures coming through the cleared space toward the cage.

Two vampires entered the cage with a third person, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their back, between them. The bound person looked male, shirtless with tattered shorts, bare feet stumbling up the short steps to the cage door.

He was untied and his blindfold removed, then shoved inside, the chain-linked door shutting and locking firmly behind him.

“Fuck,” Cyan bit out at my side.

I agreed but was too dismayed to say anything.

The guy in the cage was a brusang. Newly turned by the looks of it.

He gazed around at the crowd in stunned horror, then looked down at his hands.

Touched his stomach, the bullet hole looking-injuries that had probably killed him, and then touched his face.

He looked young, just on the cusp of adulthood.

The crowd laughed as he began to panic, crawling to the edge of the cage and curling his fingers through the gaps in the wires. His mouth formed the word, “Help,” but it was impossible to hear him. Impossible to save him.

Another lane formed in the crowd across from where the terrified brusang made his entrance. Spectators turned their attention that way and raised fists in the air as they yelled and cheered.

Much like with the first fighter, two vampires escorted a bound prisoner between them.

“Aw, shit.”

“How bad?” Cyan asked.

“Looks like a Marrower.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

The brusang wasn’t scrawny by any means. He was probably of average build for a human. But an average Marrower had twice the heft and muscle of an average human. They were usually at least a foot taller too.

It was almost comical how the escorting vampires brought the Marrower up the steps and untied him.

He could have broken their faces with a swat of his hand, but something wasn’t right.

The Marrower was slow, sluggish. That was, until one of the escorts pulled out a large syringe and stabbed the Marrower in the thigh with it, using a fair amount of strength to push the plunger all the way down.

The Marrower seemed to wake up from a stupor, rolling his massive neck around on his shoulders and snapping his jaws.

“That doesn’t look like drae,” I observed. The substance in the syringe looked like blood, but it was impossible to tell.

“We need to find out who they are.” Cyan jerked his chin at the escorting vampires now hurriedly shutting the cage door behind the prisoner. “They have no clan insignia but these fighters are clearly brought here from somewhere. They don’t seem to be here voluntarily.”

The Marrower shook his head and clasped his temples with a groan of pain, while the brusang scuttled along the cage wall looking for a way out.

“He hasn’t fed in a while,” Cyan noted about the Marrower. “He’s actually on the thin side for their kind.”

I nodded at the brusang. “And he probably hasn’t fed since he woke up from dying as a human.”

The brusang had apparently just noticed the fangs in his mouth and was touching them with a kind of fascinated horror. Their fangs were smaller than a natural-born vampire’s, but had to feel strange if you’d only had blunt teeth your whole life.

Sadly, his distraction was a costly mistake.

Across the cage, the Marrower inhaled deeply and his mouth watered. His pupils went tiny like pinpricks in burgundy irises. Cyan and I both knew the brusang’s life had ended the moment he was scented.

The crowd went insane, pressing toward the cage, yelling and cheering at the brutality manufactured for their entertainment.

Cyan and I couldn’t watch. We looked at each other instead. His expression matched how I felt—grim, frustrated, and helpless. The brusang’s screams at least cut off abruptly early on in the carnage. Hopefully that meant he died quickly.

When I dared to sneak a peak, it was already over. The Marrower knelt with a large, bloodied bone between his hands, using his lower fangs to dig inside and slurp at the marrow within. Around him, others were picking up the pieces of the brusang.

Someone went to pick up another bone near the Marrower and nearly got their head bitten off. The Marrower lunged, snapping his jaws and clutching his prized bone to his chest. It was probably the first meal he’d had in weeks.

While he was distracted, someone else came up and jabbed him in the neck with another syringe.

The Marrower spun around snarling, but whatever drug he’d been injected with was already taking effect.

He stumbled, dropped his bone, and shook his head as if to clear a fog.

By then, his hands were being retied behind his back, and it took five vampires to heave him to his feet and out of the cage.

Cyan and I shared a long, harrowing look. “I hate it here,” he said.

“Same.”

No wonder everyone was on drugs. This shit was too brutal to watch while in a normal state of mind.

More fighters were dragged into the cage, all of them death matches. None of them had been Kalix, which I didn’t know was a good or bad thing at this point. If that was him in the video, could we have been too late to save him?

“This should be the last fight,” Cyan said numbly. “If your buddy counted to four correctly.”

“Who the fuck knows.” I rubbed my face, feeling disgusting like I’d need to shower for days to clean this place off of me.

The crowd swept into a frenzy that overshadowed all of their excitement from before. Everyone was stamping their feet and chanting. I realized after a while it was a number they were all shouting. 5406 .

From the way everyone was acting, this was the final fight. The main event everyone had been waiting for. Everything leading up to this had been just an appetizer.

Like all the fights before, the crowd parted to form a corridor leading to the cage. Two escorts led a massive figure between them. I almost thought it was another Marrower. This guy had the height and muscle mass but the fangs and skin tone weren’t quite right.

His wrists also weren’t tied behind his back like the others.

This vampire was covered in chain restraints that made metallic clinking sounds with every one of his heavy steps.

When he stepped into the overhead light, my stomach dropped.

And then my heart dropped into the hole where my stomach once was.

“Oh…fuck.”

“What?” Cyan demanded. “Is it…”

All words became meaningless as we watch Kalix step into the cage.