Edie Spence (Book 5): Bloodshifted by Cassie Alexander Read Free Book Online Page A

she’d been a daytimer too—Sike. I remembered her cruel smile and her red hair—and the lengths to which she’d gone to rescue Anna and her final sacrifice to save me. I had so much more sympathy for her now that I knew what it was like to be like this. And whatever being a daytimer was, it hadn’t wrung all of the human out of her. I looked back up and found Jackson watching my face.
    “Were you close to her?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “Not as close as I am now.” I didn’t know what else to say—all the questions I wanted to ask him were too leading. I’d just said I didn’t want to kill anyone, and yet killing Raven was my quickest ticket out of here. I could hardly ask Jackson for help with that, though.
    “Stop worrying about hypotheticals,” he said sagely. “The only thing you’ll be killing today is germs in the bathroom with me.”

CHAPTER SIX
    He unlocked a closet, revealing a panoply of cleaning supplies, and then we carried the tools of our trade through two more locked doors. Locks were fine up here—because they were meant to keep prying people paying to dance out of the real catacombs below. The final door led into a basement, and I was hit by a wall of scent. Smoke, old and new, sweat, sex, fear—I stood in the doorway for a second, overwhelmed, but Jackson walked on in.
    He gestured grandly. “May I present Hell. Like so many other things in life, it looks better in the dark.”
    The room was huge, with flames painted on the walls, in colors that were garish now but probably looked better when the club’s light show was running. Mirrors curved up and down among the flames so that people could watch refracted images of themselves as they danced. A well-stocked bar stretched the entire length of one wall, two shelves of liquor illuminated by red lights from below.
    “I thought it was called the Catacombs.”
    “The whole thing is. Hell’s the first level.” He reached out and tapped the bucket I held with the end of a broom. “The sinks that fit these are only on the first floor. The club’s three floors high, and there’s a smoking patio out back.”
    “So it’s Hell because we have to carry water upstairs?”
    “No—because it gets nicer as you go up,” he explained as a thick panel of something shiny set into the ceiling caught my eye. His gaze followed and he grunted. “One-way glass. The people upstairs can look down—and the people above them can, too. Stairs and bouncers limit access and—”
    “Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven?” I guessed.
    “Perg for short,” Jackson said with a grin.
    I walked underneath the glass and looked up; it was completely opaque from down here. But everyone who was dancing here would be wondering who was looking down at them from above, and the business model fell into place inside my mind. I assumed the vampire architect or whoever’d had the bright idea to install the glass had done it so that they could see attacks coming. But what it’d done to the club was something else. Access could be controlled via the stairs, and people on one floor knew there was another floor above them that for some reason they weren’t quite good enough, attractive enough, or wealthy enough for. And those on higher floors could be as voyeuristic as they liked, looking down. I imagined them deciding to summon people dancing below—and those dancing below would have the thrill of knowing that they might be being watched and rescued.
    I walked under the glass panel in a circle. “You have parties you advertise heavily once or twice a year where you tell people they can go wherever they want, so people down here can see what they’re missing—and you let people upstairs choose people below to call up. The people down here always feel like they’re performing—and the people up there get to feel like kings.”
    Jackson nodded. “Just add in some extraordinarily attractive and attentive women, quality drugs, and truly frightening bouncers for safety