Maybe that was enough for Benson.

Maybe . . . maybe Benson wasn’t feasting on the drug dealer’s blood because he was dining on something else instead: Troy’s emotions.

Some vamps could do that, could tear all of the pain, fear, anger, and love out of a person as easily as they could rip open someone’s throat with their fangs. I’d never seen that sort of vampire in action before, though.

And I wished that I hadn’t now.

Even as the blue glow intensified on Benson’s hand, Troy seemed to deflate, like a cake that was caving in on itself. His beefy body grew thinner and thinner, his skin and cheekbones sinking in on themselves, as though he were the victim of some sort of sudden, extreme starvation. His dirty-blond hair fell out in clumps, and his breath came in a gasping, choking death rattle I knew all too well.

Even as Troy withered, Benson seemed to grow and grow, his chest expanding, his body lengthening, his arms and legs bulging until his white lab coat and pants barely contained them. One second, he was a thin, awkward, stringy puppet of a man. The next, he’d swelled up like a bodybuilder on steroids who looked like he would pop if he sneezed too hard. Troy’s emotions must be giving the vampire power, strength, and energy, the same way someone’s blood might. It looked like Benson had the odd bonus of getting actual, physical muscle mass from them too.

But the most disconcerting thing was that I could actually feel Benson pulling the pain, panic, and fear out of Troy, along with his life. Invisible sandpaper scraped at my skin, rubbing it raw. I could only imagine the excruciating pain Troy must be experiencing, being the focus of that sandpaper as it dug down deeper and deeper into him. But the sandpaper didn’t just wear down Troy. It also pulled out bits and pieces of his feelings along the way and then somehow transferred all his emotions, all his energy, all his life, into Benson, as though the vamp were a scarecrow being stuffed with straw.

Perhaps it was a by-product of the vamp’s ability, but fear blasted over me like heat from a sauna. Oh, yes. I could feel every single scrap of Troy’s hot, sweaty fear, like burrs desperately sticking to my own skin, before Benson pulled them away and swallowed them whole.

“No,” Catalina whispered. “He doesn’t deserve that. We have to save him.”

She started forward, but I clamped my hand over her mouth and dragged her back against me, making sure that we were both still hidden behind her car.

“It’s too late for him,” I muttered in her ear. “And us too if you don’t be still and keep quiet.”

Catalina struggled for a moment before slumping against me in defeat. She knew as well as I did that Troy was already dead.

Poor bastard. I almost felt sorry for him.

•

It took Benson less than two minutes to suck out all of Troy’s emotions. And when it was done, and Troy’s now bald, skeletal head lolled to the side in death, the vamp let out a long, loud, satisfied sigh, as though he’d just enjoyed the finest gourmet meal. I half-expected him to belch, but apparently, he was too dignified for that.

Benson got to his feet. His eyes burned a pale, watery blue from Troy’s pain and fear, the orbs brighter than all the lights in the garage combined. He smiled at no one in particular, and the glow from his eyes painted his fangs the same disturbing shade. None of the other vamps dared to meet his gaze, except for Silvio, who stood by patiently, no emotion at all showing on his face.

“Well,” Benson crooned. “That was a nice snack. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.”

Even his voice was larger now, bolder, stronger, and more nasal than ever before. The sound reverberated through the garage, making Catalina shiver beside me and the concrete wail and whimper with the last dregs of Troy’s fear.

With Troy dead, I expected Benson to get into his car and leave, but instead, he reached inside his coat and pulled a small notepad out of his shirt pocket, along with a pen. The click of him snapping his thumb down on top of the pen boomed as loudly as a gong in the absolute quiet of the garage.

He crouched over Troy’s body, examining it from all angles, and started scribbling on his pad. I grimaced. Benson was actually taking notes about what he’d done to the drug dealer, as though it were an innocent science experiment, instead of a sadistic, brutal execution. Not only did he take notes, but he actually pulled out his phone, snapped several photos, and then held the device up to his lips and started murmuring his observations into it. I wondered if he had some sort of sadistic memory book of all the people he’d killed. It wouldn’t surprise me.

Silvio remained still and quiet behind Benson, although the other vamps shifted on their feet, staring at the oil stains on the floor instead of at their boss. Nobody wanted to think that they might be in Troy’s position one day—dead, drained, and deconstructed.

“We’re done here,” Benson finally called out, getting to his feet and putting away his phone, pen, and pad.

Benson snapped his fingers, and one of the vamps hurried to open the rear door of the Bentley. The others got back into the Escalades, but Silvio walked over to Troy, bent down, and started rifling through his pockets, taking Troy’s wallet, phone, and the bags of pills he had stuffed in his jacket.

Oh, no. Couldn’t leave those behind when another one of Benson’s dealers could sell them.

Silvio started to rise, but his gaze caught on something glinting off to the left: Catalina’s keys.

She’d dropped them when I’d startled her earlier, and they lay about five feet away from her car, in the middle of the floor, right out in the open. I tilted my head and ground my teeth together to hold back a curse, but the faint motion caught his attention, and his gray gaze locked with my wintry one. Even worse, he spotted Catalina too, since I was still holding on to her.

Silvio’s eyes widened, and his lips puckered. Another second, two tops, and he would open his mouth and yell at the other vamps to drag us out from behind the car. Then his boss would either feast on our emotions or give us to his men to play with. Neither option was pleasant to contemplate. Oh, I could kill some of the men but probably not all of them. Not before they got hold of Catalina, and especially not with Benson looking like some roid-rage wrestler spoiling for a fight. Our best chance of surviving this was to hotfoot it out of here as fast as we could.

“Something wrong, Silvio?” Benson called out to his second-in-command from the back of the Bentley.

“Get ready to run,” I muttered in Catalina’s ear.

Silvio stared at me for another heartbeat before dropping his hand down beside Troy’s body and then smoothly rising to his feet. “Of course not. Just making sure I got everything.”

He pivoted on his wing tip, strode back over to the car, and slid in behind the wheel, as if nothing had happened. But he’d seen us. I knew that he had. So why the hell wasn’t he screaming about our presence to Benson and the other vamps?

I thought it must be some sort of trick, some ruse to get me to lower my guard and lose any chance I had of sprinting deeper into the garage and getting Catalina to safety. But Silvio cranked the engine, turned the car around, and steered it down the ramp. The two SUVs followed him.

A minute later, we were alone, and the only sound in the garage was the dark muttering of the stone around us.

6

As soon as Benson and his vamps were out of sight, I got to my feet.

“Come on,” I told Catalina. “We need to leave. In case they decide to come back.”

Catalina continued to slump next to the rear tire. Instead of standing, she curled in on herself. A sob escaped her lips, and she just crumpled. She buried her face in her hands, making her long, wavy black hair spill over her shoulders, then pulled her knees up to her chest and started rocking back and forth on the dirty concrete as she cried.

I left her to her tears. For now. My knife still in my hand, I went over to Troy—or what was left of him.

It wasn’t pretty.

I’d once seen a water elemental pull all the moisture out of a giant’s body, leaving nothing behind but a wet deck and a sloppy pile of skin and bones. This reminded me of that—except it was worse.

It wasn’t that Troy looked particularly gruesome in death. Given his now hairless head and thin figure, he resembled a cancer patient more than anything else. And his bulging eyes and scream-frozen mouth didn’t bother me in the slightest, not given all the times I’d put that same shocked and horrified expression on someone’s face. But there was an . . . emptiness in his still body, as though he were nothing more than a brittle, hollow shell, like an egg without a yolk inside. I supposed that was exactly what Troy was now, since Benson had scooped out everything inside him worth taking. Being bitten and drained of blood by a vampire was bad enough, but what Benson had done, well, it wasn’t something I wanted a repeat viewing of—ever.

I slid my knife back up my sleeve, crouched down on my knees, and rifled through Troy’s pockets, even though Silvio had already picked them clean. Sure enough, I came up empty. But my movements shifted Troy’s body to the left, and a gleam of plastic on the concrete caught my eye. I reached down and pulled a bag out from beneath the folds of his jacket.

A single blood-red pill lay inside the plastic.

It was the same pill, stamped with the same crown-and-flame rune, that Troy had given to me at the college. I remembered how Silvio’s hand had dropped down to Troy’s side before he’d driven off with Benson. He’d deliberately left the pill behind. Why? He’d seen me and, no doubt, knew exactly who I was. So why hadn’t he told his boss that I was here? And why leave one of the pills behind? Whatever Silvio Sanchez was up to, it didn’t make any sense.

I got to my feet and held the pill up to the light, turning it this way and that, but there were no other runes or marks on it, and I certainly wasn’t going to swallow it to see what it would do to me. Maybe Bria would find it useful.

I slid the pill into my jeans pocket, then stalked over, grabbed Catalina’s keys from the floor, and rounded the side of the car. The sharp jangle-jangle-jangle of metal cut through her sobs, and she slowly lifted her head. This time, I didn’t take no for an answer. I put my hand on her arm and gently helped her to her feet.

“Come on,” I said, unlocking the car and opening the passenger’s-side door. “We need to get out of here. I’ll drive you home.”

“You’re not—you’re not just going to leave him there, are you?” Catalina croaked out.

She moved away from the car and headed in Troy’s direction.

“You don’t want to look at that,” I called out.

But it was already too late. Catalina’s face paled at the sight of her ex-boyfriend lying on the cold concrete and the horrible way he’d died. She clamped her hand to her mouth, staggered away a few feet, and threw up.

I sighed and leaned against the side of the car. When she finished, Catalina straightened up, pulled a tissue out of her jeans pocket, and used it to wipe off her mouth. I hoped that she would hurry over to the car and that would be the end of things, but instead, she went right back over to Troy’s body, with disgust, guilt, and grief tightening her pretty features as she stared down at him.

“We need to call somebody . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“And tell them what?” I asked, my voice more sarcastic than it should have been. “That we witnessed Beauregard Benson, one of the most dangerous men in Ashland, kill one of his own dealers? It’s not exactly a news flash. What we need to do is get out of here and forget this ever happened.”

Catalina whipped around, her hair flying around her shoulders, her hands balling into fists. “I’m not leaving him!” she screamed.

The concrete around her let out a single sharp wail that melted into low, gravelly mutters of determination. The sound matched the mulish expression on Catalina’s face. I thought about knocking her out, shoving her into her own car, and driving away with her. But I had the feeling that if I took so much as one step toward her, she would start screaming again—or, worse, bolt out of the garage.

If she did that, someone was sure to see her, and word would get out about Catalina running away from the scene of a gruesome murder with me chasing her. Then we’d both be in more trouble than we already were. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic to the trauma Catalina had witnessed, but I had enough problems already without attracting the attention of Beauregard Benson.

Since I couldn’t get Catalina to leave and I didn’t want Benson and his men to come back and find us, that left me with only one option.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll call someone. Look, I’m doing it right now, see?”

Catalina stared at me, still angry and suspicious, so I pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket and hit a number in the speed dial. Three rings later, she picked up.

“Coolidge.”

“Hey, baby sister.”

“Hey, Gin.” Bria paused. “What’s up?”

“Why ever would you think that something’s up?” I said in my best, most innocent, I-haven’t-killed-anybody-yet-tonight voice.

“Because you never call me at work unless your work has somehow become my work,” she said, a teasing note creeping into her voice. “So who is it this time, and how many bodies are there?”

The fact that she could joke about it was something of a miracle. Detective Bria Coolidge was a good cop, and my being the Spider was something that didn’t exactly sit well with her at times. But we’d slowly come to an agreement ever since she’d returned to Ashland. Bria would never like my being an assassin, but she understood why I did it, the same way that I understood her being a cop and wanting to help people, even if the law was a running joke in our city and the only justice most folks got was what they made for themselves.