“You go first,” Mel said, dragging me forward a little. “It’s you they want.”
I turned to look at my friends and coworkers. They were so beautiful and bright and sparkling, their half-masks doing nothing to disguise who they were. Their skin and smiles couldn’t be hidden.
“No. Please. Y’all—”
Bea pointed at me and shooed me toward the front.
I smiled and fluffed my skirt and forced my shoulders down proudly. Swinging my hips, I led them down the hallway toward the stage, where a wide, curving staircase had been brought in to cover the orchestra pit and connect the stage to the theater floor. The seats were gone, cleared away and stacked along the wall to leave room for dancing.
I paused in the wings, as I’d been told to. At some unseen signal, the orchestra started up with a grand processional that, to be quite honest, sounded like the “Imperial March” from Star Wars. Head up and wearing my fangs proudly, I sashayed onto the stage and stopped at the top of the stairs. The murmuring crowd went quiet, every masked face in the room turning to watch us in hungry silence. The daimon girls fanned out behind me, and I tried to imagine what it must be like to be in the audience. In front, in shades of black and white and red, the vampire starlet promised paradise with her teeth, while behind her, a harmless, glittering rainbow of dancing girls spread like angel wings, ready to provide pleasure just for the joy of sharing themselves. It was like something out of a movie or a fairy tale, except that I felt less like a star and more like a reluctant bride, bought and paid for.
We took the stairs in time with the music. Charline brought a man to meet me at the bottom stair, a foreigner with a red-dyed beard and shoes turned up at the toes. He performed an elaborate bow, the tiny bells on his unusually colorful suit jingling. Every other man at the ball wore dress whites, but this gentleman wore mauve and plum and bright poppy red.
“La Demitasse, at last. I have traveled the entire continent to meet you, my dear.”
“May I present Prince Seti, the ruler of Kyro?”
I resented the warning in Madame Sylvie’s voice but was too well groomed to hiss near the man who had probably paid a king’s ransom for my time. I only smiled, sweetly. “I knew I was waiting for something special,” I murmured, letting him kiss my hand.
The music segued into a quadrille, and I was soon dancing, surrounded by colorful daimons matched with austere men in black, the opposite of my gawdy partner and me. The air grew hot and humid with lust, and the daimons’ laughter shook the rafters. My feet hurt already in the dainty slippers, but I preferred dancing to doing what the prince expected me to do, considering the price he had likely paid for what he thought was my virginity. I would dance all night if it would keep me from the elephant.
After three songs and many polite compliments and murmured thanks, I begged to sit for a moment.
“I will bring you wine, my dear. I brought a special cask from Egypt. Have you tasted camel blud? I hear it’s quite the aphrodisiac to your kind.”
“I can’t wait,” I said, but inwardly, I cringed. Why did rich men keep trying to cram weird animals down my throat? Then again, if camel was half as good as unicorn, I would have no right to complain.
The prince disappeared, and I darted through the crowd toward one of the niches that had been created using the velvet curtains that hung from the walls. I knew damned well they were there so the girls could discreetly provide their services without leaving the theater, but surely it was too early for one of the small enclosures to be occupied? This one still had the flaps open and drawn back invitingly.
Inside, I saw only a long quilted bench. But before I could duck in to hide, an insistent hand caught my wrist and pulled me back to the floor. I spun, barely turning my snarl into the simper that my patrons expected.
“My prince, I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
But it wasn’t the prince, and my heart leaped into my throat. Scowling at the interloper’s wicked grin, I grabbed his spotless black sleeve and dragged him into the alcove.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Enjoying the ball, bébé.”
“They’ll skin you alive!”
“Define they. Define skin.”
Vale strolled to the bench and sat down, knees spread, arms across the back, green eyes glinting like a cat’s in the light of a single lantern hanging from the tent’s ceiling. A rich man’s walking cane was balanced across his knees, and I wondered which tuxedo-clad client he’d stolen it from. I’d never seen him so cocky. I’d never seen him so clean. I’d definitely never seen him so devastatingly sexy. I rushed back to the velvet and untied the thick black tassels that held open the flaps. The curtains closed us in completely, and firelit darkness swallowed me whole. I tied the ropes in a double knot.
I turned to find Vale watching me, his high top hat on the bench beside him. His bare hands were buried in the plush, rubbing absentmindedly as if there was an itch he couldn’t scratch, somewhere just out of reach.
“How’d you get in?” I asked, just to have something to fill the space besides my spooked breathing and his scent, that musky chai that spoke of wildness and wind blowing over a thin veil of respectability.
“The same way I always do, bébé. You know that.”
“But why? Why risk it? What if Madame Sylvie saw you?”
“Hypotheticals don’t interest me, not with you standing there, dressed like that.” He curled a finger and smirked. “Viens sur mon coeur . . . Tigre adoré.”
My body jerked toward him like a puppet on tight strings, as if Baudelaire’s words in Vale’s dusky voice were a command in a language I didn’t know I knew. Tiny steps in satin slippers carried me whispering across the ballroom floor, until the rounded skirt of my gown brushed his knees like a satin jellyfish.
“That’s more like it.”
He whipped his cane around me, holding me caged with both arms tight against my corseted waist and the polished wood at my back. His black tuxedo pants dented my dress, the distorted black-and-white designs briefly reminding me of a zebra that had lost the game and twitched under a lion’s heavy paws.
“But aren’t we fighting?”
“If you wish, bébé. Use your claws to punish me. I don’t mind.”
“The prince—” I started lamely.
“Forget him. He’s been detained.” He looked up, winked at me. “I am a bit of a prince myself, you know.”
“Prince of the brigands?”
“Prince of the Brigands of Ruin. Prince of the wild moors. And my palace is a hell of a lot bigger than his.”
I raised one eyebrow, suppressed a smile. “And how big is it?”
He chuckled. “Enormous, bébé. I’ll show you one day. My palace is as big as the sky.”
“Then why don’t you claim it?”
He shook his head when I broke an unspoken rule of our flirting. But he recovered quickly, a golden fire dancing in his eyes. “Maybe you’re right, bébé. Maybe I should start claiming the things I see as mine.”
He jerked the cane forward and dropped it, and I fell into his open arms as it clattered to the floor. His hands were clever as he spun me, and I ended up sitting across his lap in the black-and-white cloud of my dress, his arm around my back. My mouth was still open in surprise, and before I could close it, he was kissing me, his other hand firm on my chin to hold me, just so.
Oh, God, that kiss. I’d had plenty of blood since yesterday’s absinthe, but I felt suddenly as drunk and dizzy and reeling as if I had just completed a wild tarantella dance, spinning and spinning and spinning. He had kissed me before—rough as the brick in the hallway, soft as the swing of a trapeze in the breeze. But this kiss matched the cozy, heart-red velvet lair that held us, a little world outside of real life.