Page 5 of Lifeblood

The warm length that’d grown between his thighs with the excitement of catching his prey.

Before I knew it, my breath had hitched even while the demonic guards kept hauling me along a hallway deep inside the lottery building. It’d only been a day since I’d been caught stealing from the King of the Court of Brimstone’s quarters in London and still I could smell his campfire and smoke scent all around me.

“Hurry,” one of the demonic guards spat before yanking on my arm.

I scowled and raised my chin but didn’t reply. They deserved nothing. They weren’t the kings who had ordered this lottery, but each and every demonic guard was sure as hell party to it. To the fates of all those women who’d been lost.

Women I could have also saved. Even if only for a while, until my silver lifeblood blood had run dry.

Guilt, as it so often did, cooled my anger and defiance. The heavy weight of it fell to the pit of my stomach and began to rot. It was an uneasy mental dance I did whenever I thought about hiding. When I’d been a little girl, it had made sense. And even as a teen. But after nearly two hundred years of life, cowardice didn’t seem so excusable.

The guards led me deeper into the Shard, which had long ago been made a center for the Demon Court’s wife lottery. A fancy, newer building in the center of London. As prominent and hard to miss as the demon kings themselves.

It was here the lottery winners were taken every year. The women who were sent to the demon kings to be used and ravished and ultimately cast aside, presumably to their deaths.

I followed in their footsteps now where maybe I should have walked instead years ago. Through the hallways and into an elevator, where the demonic guards brought us to the top floors of the Shard. There, they pulled me off the elevator and into a brightly lit room full of dressing and makeup stations like something out of a movie set.

Everywhere I looked, posh furniture met with carts filled with expensive champagne and shiny glass flutes. Not to be touched by the women who won the lottery, I thought, but for the demons here who flocked around us the moment we entered.

“What’s this?” one asked, a woman with bright-purple hair done up like a beehive. It didn’t fool me. Even from here, I could sense the demonic darkness within her simmering just beneath her matching purple dress.

Demons didn’t always look human, but many of them who visited the Humanlands, especially London, seemed to prefer humanoid form. I wondered, too, if some were locked in this form as the demon kings were supposed to be thanks to their curses.

Another man, tall and skinny, and dressed in a fine, tailored suit that made him look like a sunflower, tutted. “Where are the other three? We have to start on them all at the same time.”

The first woman chimed in again. “We can’t keep the kings waiting.”

I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. The fact that they clearly treated this like an event and not something utterly life-changing ground on my guilt. “They’ll be fine.”

“She’s a lifeblood,” one of the guards supplied before reaching for my bound hands and raising my palm. The bleeding had stopped thanks to my fast healing, but the dried bits of silver remained. “She’s all they’ll need. And all they want.”

So itwasthe demon kings the guards had been talking to outside.They already know I’m here.

Both of the attendants’ eyes widened, and it was the woman who spoke first. She nodded grimly at me, as if she were finally acknowledging what was actually happening here. Not just with this lottery, but with all of them.

“You’re brave,” she said. “I’m sorry for what’s been done to your kind.”

I wanted to shrug because it wasn’tshewho’d killed them or ordered their deaths. And without knowing how old she was, it wasn’t like I could blame her for being party to the killings the same way she was now a willing participant in the wife lottery. Instead, I muttered, “Thank you.”

“We’ve no time!” said Sunflower Man as he grabbed my hands where they were bound and pulled me from the guards’ grasp. “We’ll take it from here. She’s not going anywhere.”

No. Not like this.

I’d taken Maria’s spot to save her life. And I wouldn’t be going back on that for anything, no matter how scared I was. And that fearwasgrowing. It carved a spot for itself somewhere between my throat and stomach and churned endlessly.

“I’ll be good,” I said to the guards. The resignation in my voice shocked even me.

“See?” said Sunflower Man. “Let’s go.”

He drew me from the elevator bay and marched me up to the closest dressing station. “Hmm,” he said as he tapped his chin. A selection of dresses, each of them bright and the height of fashion, had been laid out on a rack. It felt like a scene out of so many older movies where I, some ugly duckling, was about to be made over.

But I knew something this man and all the other attendants didn’t. That not even the guards knew.

I’d already met one of the demon kings, and I’d done so in thief’s clothes and a mask. I’d already won him over by virtue of being his mate—or at least, some partial mate. And, sure, we both had very much despised the idea, but it didn’t change the facts.

Fate had made us mates.

Circumstance made my blood the answer to renewing his and his fellow kings’ immortality.

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