“Lucky us.”

Ivy chuckled, bright and devilish. “I have a feeling I know what made him do it. Or who.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me.

“No.”

“Do you want to bet?”

No. I wasn’t crazy enough to bet on the intentions of an angel. And what if he had become our trainer because of me? What if this was his way of cracking my secret? A shiver rippled through my body.

“They both like you,” Ivy said again.

Ok, maybe I could see Harker liking me. He’d admitted that Legion officers didn’t socialize with initiates, and yet he’d talked to me in front of everyone. He’d also been nothing but really nice to me ever since I’d arrived at the Legion.

But Nero? No way. He’d made the last month of my life a living hell.

Before I could ponder this further, however, men decked out in black leather flooded into the club, surrounding us all.

11

Vampire's Kiss

The fight broke out all around me. The men in black looked like mercenaries. I didn’t see any markings on their clothing to indicate they belonged to a larger organization. And they were all human. That, at least, was in our favor.

What wasn’t in our favor were the numbers. The mercenaries outnumbered us two-to-one, and they were armed with enough knives to make an assassin weep with envy.

One of the men ran at me. I evaded, dashing toward the bar. I dialed up the magic smoke machine used to make the bombastic cocktails to full power. Multi-colored smoke poured out of the Magitech machine, spreading everywhere in the club. It was damn near impossible to see, but it must have been worse for the mercenaries. If we could see the attackers even a little better than they could see us, that might be the advantage we needed. Plus, we could depend on our other senses.

Another mercenary emerged from the glowing smoke. Towering two heads above me and built to crack rocks with his biceps, he was a beast of a man. He swiped a knife at me. I dashed away. He was swinging that thing hard enough to take my arm off, and I was actually rather attached to the thing. He continued to slash and swipe, forcing me into a retreat. My back was against the bar.

His knife slammed down, piercing the wood countertop. I’d barely moved my hand away in time. This guy wasn’t fooling around. Maybe Nero had been right after all. I couldn’t always run away. My eyes flickered to the mercenary’s knife in the counter. It was wedged pretty tightly in there. That didn’t seem to bother him. He was already drawing another one.

I jumped up onto the counter and gripped the handle of the stuck knife, using it to pivot myself around. As I slid around that point, I kicked out, slamming my foot hard against the mercenary’s head. He fell to the ground, knocked out cold.

Hardly believing my luck, I hopped off the counter to look for his friends. I found them all on the floor, most of them unconscious but a few dead. Three of my fellow initiates had been stabbed, but none of them were dead. It could have just as easily gone the other way for us. What the hell had happened here? Why had these men attacked us?

It was then that I saw what fear and adrenaline had prevented me from realizing earlier. We initiates hadn’t been the only ones in the club tonight, but we were the only ones standing here now. The mercenaries had gone straight for us. The Legion soldiers hadn’t lifted a finger to help us. In fact, they were nowhere in sight.

The colorful steam blew away, as if dismissed by magic, and I saw the Legion soldiers step into the club. Nero was at the front, followed by Harker and Captain Somerset—and then a few more Legion soldiers I didn’t know, including the ones who’d been gawking at me and Harker.

“They set us up,” I said to Ivy, but the glare in my eyes was solely for Nero. “This was another one of their tests.”

“Yes, it was a test,” Nero said, addressing the whole room. “Everything is a test. You knew this going into the Legion. Only the strong survive.” He set a bottle and a goblet down on the bar counter. “You will drink once more from the Nectar of the Gods, a stronger dose this time. Those who are strong enough will make the transition and gain Vampire’s Kiss, the first ability in the Legion. You will be one of us.”

He didn’t say what would happen to those who were not strong enough. That much was already obvious.

“Form a line,” Nero commanded.

And like good little initiates, we did as he said. I was near the back of the line this time. I watched in horror as six of my fellow initiates died before it was finally my turn.

I took the full goblet from Nero, chugging down the crimson liquid as fast as I could, praying that I didn’t throw it up again. I removed the possibility of my own death from my mind. It wasn’t helping.

I neither died nor threw up. I didn’t even shake or spasm. Not this time. This time when I drank from the Nectar of the Gods, I wanted more. The liquid danced across my tongue in a symphony of sensations I couldn’t get enough of. I looked down into the empty goblet, bemoaning that I’d drunk it so fast. As Nero reached for the goblet, I latched onto his arm, holding onto it with sheer desperation.

“More,” I said, my voice thick with need.

That elicited a response on that granite face. Surprise flashed in his eyes. I tried to grab the bottle that held the Nectar, but he reached out, catching my hand. A shock of static electricity sizzled across our hands.

He opened his mouth to speak to me, but then must have thought differently of it. His hand locking mine in an iron grip, he pulled me away from the bar. “Come on, initiates. Get moving.” He motioned to Harker. “Take over.”