War Of The Alphas: Alpha - War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 23
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War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 23

"You're funny. I like you," Lucifer said. "Let's be friends."

"Let's not. You're a friend of Stark's."

He nudged her playfully. His hands were so cold. "That appears to be something else we have in common, doesn't it?"

Stark returned with a large crate of lethe cradled in his arms. He shoved it at Lucifer. "Take it and leave."

"This isn't half," Lucifer said.

"You're not getting half. I said I'd give you a quarter."

"This isn't a quarter, either."

"Do you think you're going to carry that much lethe out of here tonight? Right now?"

"Personally? No. But I do have some of my murder here, if you'll drop the wards and allow them inside."

"Is that what they're called?" Deirdre asked. "A group of vampires is a murder, like crows? I've never heard that before."

"I'm hoping it will catch on." Lucifer turned to Stark. "We've got practices surrounding this, though. Breaking bread and whatnot. My people won't want to take this and run, and I don't think yours will, either. We're allies now. Friends! We need to celebrate in the manner our culture has deemed appropriate."

"Fine." Stark dismissed the vampire with a wave of his hand. "Take however much you think they can take into the lobby. An entire pallet, if you want. And this." He tossed a large glass bulb to Deirdre.

Her hands shot out on instinct and closed around the glass tubing.

It looked like a weird bong.

"Are we going to do some hookah?" she asked, turning it around to look at the light through the blue glass.

"It's for lethe," Lucifer said. "For doing it socially."

Deirdre had never taken lethe with anyone but Stark. She'd assumed that everyone just did it the way they did-with needles or intake bracelets.

Once she knew what it was for, she figured out where the lethe would go, and where the heating element belonged. It wasn't exactly a complicated mechanism. Drugs were drugs, and there were only so many ways to ingest.

"Is this the time?" Deirdre hissed to Stark as he hefted a box under one arm. "You never allowed drugs at the asylum."

"We didn't have vampires at the asylum," he said. "They have a different culture surrounding the spoils of war."

"Their breed can't have a culture. They didn't exist ten years ago."

"You'd be amazed," Stark said.

"No, I wouldn't. Because vampires don't have any kind of social structure, unlike the sidhe and the shifters. It hasn't happened, and I'd know if it had, because I used to live with a vampire."

"We will do this," Stark said. "And you will participate, and you will pretend to enjoy yourself, because this is the kind of thing we need to do to keep the vampires on our side. It won't be enough to be Alpha of the shifters alone. We'll need all the gaeans on our side when I take control."

"The election and the oath would take care of that," Deirdre said.

He just handed her another glass bulb and headed to the lobby, where more vampires were entering to mingle with the shifters. Between the boarded windows and gloomy lighting, the high-rise was rapidly starting to resemble the asylum-not exactly Deirdre's idea of a cozy place to live.

Lucifer snagged one of the pipes out of her hand and took it to a coffee table between a pair of leather couches.

Deirdre hung back as they began breaking open cubes of lethe.

She was hungering for a dose. Or six.

And she wasn't the only one.

She'd never seen so many vampires in one place before. Deirdre had always perceived them as solitary creatures. Jolene hadn't hung out with other vampires.

But Lucifer had almost ten vampires with him. Those were just the ones in the building, too.

They were organizing.

"You won't make me light this alone, will you?" Lucifer asked Deirdre, shooting a smile at her.

She glanced at Stark. He gestured to the couch. "Celebrate the alliance." That was an order, and not a happy one. He seemed about as happy to be there as she was.

Deirdre sat across from Lucifer. Geoff joined them. So did Ember, one of the shifters they'd liberated from the safe house. It didn't escape her attention that the men sat beside her, not the vampire. It was a quiet show of solidarity.

"Cheers," Ember said.

He took the lighter from Lucifer, flicked it to life, held the flame under the bulb of the pipe.

It heated. Smoke filled the air.

Deirdre inhaled as Stark left the room.

It was hard to relax into a social setting when so many people had fangs and bloodless flesh. Someone found the receiver for Chadwick Hawfinch's audio system and played music, while Gianna started dancing in the corner, but it still didn't feel like a party to Deirdre.

She was too aware of the people waiting for her upstairs. Rylie and Marion and the secretary of the Office of gods-damned Preternatural Affairs.

They were celebrating their alliance while holding on to some of the most powerful politicians in the preternatural world.

The other shifters seemed immune to Deirdre's tense mood. They joined Gianna in dancing. They talked with the vampires, relaxing into their company, increasingly friendly as more lethe was passed throughout the room.

But the vampires didn't exactly seem happy, either. They were more self-contained than the shifters. Wary.

The odor of burning lethe was acidic.

Deirdre was transported back to the Summer Court and their party drenched in heady seelie magic, as warm as pomegranates rotting in sunlight and dry grass swaying in the breeze and the sweat-kissed skin of young men.

The seelie's perverse hedonism had still been less perverse than what the vampires and shifters did. They screwed each other in the shadows of the lobby, but there was no joy to it. The vampires weren't inhaling the lethe's gases because it felt good, and their eyes didn't glaze from orgiastic bliss. When they took another hit, it was done with fear, as though struggling to push away the horrors of reality rather than embracing the sweet rapture of life.

The vampires were starving. Low on resources. In need of blood.

Lucifer had brought some of the horse blood up to get dispensed by the Behexed, but it wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

Deirdre couldn't hang out in the haze of smoke. She couldn't watch people destroying themselves in pursuit of escapism, and she couldn't escape from the knowledge of the people they had left upstairs.

The gases were getting to her. The walls were distorting as they always did. Faint colors rimmed her vision.

She needed to leave.

"Have you seen Stark?" she asked Ember, who cradled a pipe between his forefinger and thumb.

Smoke plumed from his nostrils when he exhaled. "He went to the basement, last I saw." Ember gave a small chuckle, eyes sliding shut. "I get it now. I get everything."

"What are you talking about?" Geoff had slumped against the other werewolf's shoulder.

"The lethe. It feels so much better with it than without it." He offered the pipe to Deirdre. It was huge in her vision, swollen, thrashing like a viper just barely contained in his grip.

She shook her head, stood, backed away.

Lucifer watched her, crimson eyes tracking her motion across the lobby. Gianna was still dancing. Her arms swayed, trees in the wind, hips rolling and cheeks flushed.

The elevator doors slid shut on Deirdre, blocking out the music. The smoke was trapped inside with her.

She dropped to the basement.

At first, Deirdre thought the sound of pounding was in her head-just the amplified sound of her beating heart and the rush of blood through her veins. But when the hallway slipped past her and she reached the stables in the basement, she saw that someone had opened all the stalls to let the horses out.

The pounding was hooves.

A ramp at the end of the stalls led to a loading bay door on the ground level. A truck had been backed up to that door.

Two men helped the sickly horses into the truck bed. One was a stranger in a polo shirt and ball cap, guiding the horses by the bridle. The other was Everton Stark, who supervised from a distance. His mere presence was enough to herd the horses toward the trailer.

Deirdre had come downstairs intending to confront him, but the sight of Stark herding the horses was confusing enough that all words vanished from her mind.

It only took a few moments to get the rest of the horses into the trailer. They must have been working the entire time that Deirdre had been upstairs with the vampires. Stark talked quietly with the man in the polo shirt for a few minutes as Deirdre watched in stunned silence, trying to decide if the lethe could have given her the most vivid hallucination of her life.

The stranger closed the trailer. Money exchanged hands.

He drove away.

Stark pulled the loading bay door shut, blocking out the scent of the damp night air. The stench of blood and horse droppings lingered.

When he was done, he turned to see Deirdre standing by the elevator.

"You're supposed to be upstairs," he said.

"Geoff and Ember are entertaining Lucifer." She glanced into the nearest stall. All that remained was a smear on the floor that could have been any bodily fluid. "What did you-where did they go?"

Stark folded his arms, frowning at her. "I sold them."

"You gave him money," Deirdre said. "I saw you give him money." She rubbed her temples. "Am I hallucinating?"

"Yes, you probably are."

"So, what, you've sent them to a glue factory? Ignominious end for horses that were tortured their entire lives?"

"How much lethe have you taken, Tombs?" Stark asked.

"Not nearly enough to be okay with this," Deirdre said. "We need to talk, Stark. Not about the horses. You just went and told all our allies that we're not participating in the election."

"We aren't," he said.

"But we need to. I thought you understood how this was necessary to ultimately defeat Rhiannon."

"That's what you seem to think, yes," Stark said. "I have plans. I don't need your help, and I don't need Rylie Gresham's election."

"If you don't agree to this, Friederling is going to have me arrested."

"How will he arrest you if he's trapped in a cell upstairs?"

"There's an outstanding warrant with my name on it. It doesn't have to be Friederling doing the arresting. Next time I cross paths with any OPA agent, they'll toss me in jail."

"That's the life we're living together, Tombs," Stark said. "You don't get to be the double agent anymore. You can't stand by my side and slip favors to Rylie Gresham under the table. If you're really loyal to me, you're just going to have to deal with being a fugitive from justice. And yes-that will be for the rest of your life. However many lives that may be."

"I don't know why I'm surprised you won't act like a decent human being," Deirdre said. "You sold the blood factory horses for dog food or whatever. All you care about is your stupid vendetta against your wife."

The corner of his mouth lifted in something that might have been a smile. "I want you to return to Lucifer. Don't leave his side. We might be allied with the vampires, but I don't trust them." He took a pamphlet from his pocket and handed it to her.

"What is this?" she asked, trying to focus her eyes on the pamphlet.

"Go upstairs and entertain Lucifer," Stark said.

He went downstairs to the sub-basement, leaving her alone with the empty stalls.

It was a pamphlet for a rescue that handled animals abused by factory farms. There were happy sheep with scarred faces on the front and pictures of tiny pig cages on the inside.

"What in the world?" Deirdre muttered.

She flipped the pamphlet over. There was a picture of the man with the polo shirt and baseball cap on the back.

Stark must have given the horses to the rescue along with...what, a donation?

It didn't make her feel better to realize how unpredictable he could be. It made her feel like the remaining time in Rylie and Secretary Friederling's lives could be counted by hours rather than years-however long it took for Stark's mercurial mercies to swing toward the murderous again.

The high from the lethe must have been stronger than Deirdre realized, because she soon found herself unlocking the cell door without any memory of how she had gotten upstairs.

Those four powerful captives were waiting for her. They stood against the back wall of the room, speaking in low voices. But when Deirdre entered, all eyes fell on her.

Rylie broke away from the others. She was moving well for a woman whose neck had been broken just hours earlier. There was nothing quite like Alpha healing. "I take it from your expression that you don't have good news."

"Stark isn't going to participate in the election, and he's probably going to kill you all," Deirdre said.