Stiles
By the time we got to the cannoli, Elijah had only threatened my life twice—both times over how I held my steak knife—which I considered a massive diplomatic triumph for everybody involved.
"Look, all I'm saying," I said, leaning back in my chair with my ankle propped comfortably on my knee while I licked a dab of ricotta filling off my thumb, "is that if you've been alive since the Viking Age and you still haven't tried dipping fried pastry shell into twenty-year-old scotch, you've been wasting your immortality, Suit. Live a little."
Across the mahogany table, Elijah pinched the bridge of his nose for a fraction of a second before picking up his wineglass. "Every syllable you utter lowers the property value of this district by another thousand dollars, Stiles."
"Good thing you guys don't pay property taxes," I shot back cheerfully, before looking across the candlesticks at Hope.
She was sitting with her chin propped in her palm, a bright, unhidden smile curving her lips as she watched me drive her uncle up the wall. All through dinner, every time my knee brushed hers under the table or our fingers touched reaching for the bread basket, that warm golden loop between our blood had hummed beneath our skin like a private current.
It was wild how fast I'd gotten used to feeling her there. Three days ago, the inside of my chest had just been me, the wolf, the beast, and the siphon—loud, hungry, and completely solo. Now, right alongside my own pulse, there was this steady, glowing ember of Hope's magic sitting behind my ribs.
At the head of the table, Klaus set his empty wine goblet down on the linen and looked toward the open French doors leading into the courtyard.
"Someone is coming up the street," Klaus said quietly. "Fast. And bleeding."
I tilted my head, tuning out the trickle of the fountain and the distant brass band over on Canal. Two blocks south toward the river, footsteps were staggering up the sidewalk alongside a rapid, erratic heartbeat and the unmistakable metallic tang of spilled vampire blood mixed with grave dirt.
Hope felt it at the same time I did; her eyes flashed brief amber in the candlelight as she stood up from her chair beside me.
Ten seconds later, Joshua Rosza stumbled through the open wrought-iron gates of the compound, one hand clamped tightly over a jagged, smoking gash across his ribs where his denim jacket had been seared away to the bone. Behind him, Marcel strode into the courtyard, his dark coat torn at the shoulder and his jaw set hard.
"Josh!" Hayley was out of her chair and across the stone threshold in two strides, catching the younger vampire by his good arm to guide him toward the courtyard bench while Freya hurried out with a damp cloth. "What happened?"
"The Ninth Ward," Marcel said grimly, stopping beside the fountain as Klaus, Elijah, Hope, and I stepped out onto the flagstones under the lanterns. "Turns out those two practitioners Stiles nailed to the wall down at the Bywater distillery this morning had an elder sister—Genevieve's old protégé, Celestine. She didn't come after the compound, and she didn't come after Stiles alone."
Marcel's eyes shifted straight to me, then to Hope standing at my shoulder.
"Twenty minutes ago, Celestine and eight elders from the Lafayette Cemetery covens broke into the Regent vaults under St. Louis Number One," Marcel continued. "They pulled out the Lescheres sacrificialthurible—an old seventeenth-century plague censer forged to purge foreign bloodlines during the yellow fever outbreaks—and took three of my nightwalkers off the street on Decatur to fuel it. Josh barely got out before they locked the cemetery gates."
"A plague censer," Freya repeated sharply, looking up from where she was pressing a healing poultice against the smoking hex-burn on Josh's ribs. "I read about that artifact in the old Quarter grimoires. It doesn't cast a boundary spell you can touch—it burns consecrated bone ash into the air across the entire district and turns shared blood magic into acid inside the lungs of anyone linked to the target."
Klaus's eyes went molten gold in an instant. "And since Sabine's remnants already knew Hope's blood was linked to Stiles—"
"—they're lighting the censer inside the Lafayette tomb right now using the ash they scraped off the distillery floor this morning," Josh rasped from the bench, wincing as the black burn on his ribs hissed under Freya's hand. "They can't kill Stiles directly, so they're using the residue from the distillery fire to poison the resonance bond between him and Hope. Once that smoke hits the third cycle, anyone carrying both signatures in their veins starts drowning in their own blood."
As if on cue, the air above the French Quarter gave a low, sub-audible *thrum* that made the water in the courtyard fountain ripple in sharp concentric rings.
Right behind my sternum, the warm golden thread connecting me to Hope gave a sudden, violent jerk.
Beside me, Hope gasped, her hand flying to her throat as a thin trickle of bright red blood spilled from her nostril and a wave of shivering, fever-hot static slammed through the bond between us.
I felt the poison hit my side of the link at the exact same second—like inhaling vaporized razor blades laced with lye. My lungs seized once, burning hot, before my Upgraded Original healing and my siphon slammed down on the toxin in my own chest and burned it into harmless steam in half a second.
Except Hope wasn't a siphoner.
She couldn't drain the poison out of the bond; every time the censer pulsed in the cemetery a mile away, the corrupted ash from the distillery was pumping straight down the bridge between our blood and settling into her lungs.
Hope coughed—a sharp, wet sound that left a fleck of red on her lower lip as her knees buckled slightly on the flagstones.
I caught her in both arms before Klaus or Hayley could even reach her, lifting her lightly against my chest as my right palm pressed flat over her collarbone.
"Get your hands off her!" Klaus roared, lunging forward with his fangs bared, terrified that my proximity was feeding the link. "The censer is using the bond between your blood to reach her—if you stay near her—"
"Touch me right now, Klaus, and I swear to god I'll put you through the floor," I snarled, my voice dropping all trace of humor as my eyes blazed pure crimson-gold and I opened my siphon wide against Hope's skin.
Klaus froze half a step away as he saw what was happening beneath my palm.
Dark, smoky violet veins of plague magic were trying to spiderweb outward from Hope's collarbone into her lungs—and as my fingers pressed against her skin, the violet poison reversed direction, pulling right out of her chest into my palm in a steady stream of crimson sparks.
Hope let out a shaky breath against my shoulder, the rattle clearing instantly from her chest as her color returned and her fingers gripped the lapel of my suit jacket.
"See that?" I bit out, looking up from Hope's face to glare at Klaus, Elijah, and Freya while my siphon burned the cemetery poison out of my own wrist like scrap paper. "The censer's pumping the rot through the air into both ends of the tether. As long as I'm holding onto her, I can vacuum every drop of it out of her bloodstream before it touches her lungs. If I let go of her while that thing is still burning in Lafayette Cemetery, she takes the full hit on her own."
Freya didn't waste a second arguing. "He's right, Niklaus. He's acting as a lightning rod for the curse—if you separate them before the thurible is destroyed, the backlash will tear through Hope's heart."
"Then we go to Lafayette Cemetery now and tear the tombs down around their ears," Klaus said, lethal and cold, already turning toward the gates with Elijah and Marcel flanking him.
"Wait," Hope said, pushing up on her boots without letting go of my arm. She wiped the drop of blood from beneath her nose with the back of her hand, her blue eyes blazing into fierce, furious werewolf gold as she looked at her father and then up at me. "If I stay here in the courtyard while Stiles goes to the cemetery, the second he's out of arm's reach, the censer hits me again. And if he stays here holding my hand while you go, Celestine's covens will have twenty minutes to reinforce the tomb wards against vampires."
"You are not coming to the cemetery while a plague ritual is active," Hayley said sharply, stepping in front of her daughter.
"Mom, the only person in this room who can walk straight through a consecrated witch barrier while siphoning the poison out of my chest is standing right next to me!" Hope shot back, her fingers lacing tightly through my left hand so the golden current between us flared bright enough to cast our shadows across the brick wall. "As long as Stiles has a hand on me, their spell does nothing but feed him. Let us go break the censer together."
I looked down at Hope—at the fierce, fearless tilt of her chin and the wildfire sparking at her fingertips—anddespite the scorching taste of cemetery ash still burning on the back of my tongue, a wide, razor-sharp grin broke across my face.
"Man, I really picked the right girl," I said, rolling my shoulders as I ripped my suit jacket off with my free hand and tossed it onto the courtyard bench so I wouldn't ruin the tailoring, leaving me in my black button-down with the sleeves rolled up to my elbows. "Here's the play, Klaus: you, Elijah, and Marcel take the outer perimeter of the cemetery and handle the nightwalker guards and the perimeter witches so nobody runs out the back door. Hope and I are going straight down the middle to the main tomb."
Klaus's jaw worked as every protective instinct in his thousand-year-old body warred with the cold tactical reality in front of him. He looked at my hand locked tightly around Hope's wrist—watching another pulse of dark violet plague-smoke try to rise under her skin, only to be swallowed instantly by the red glow of my siphon before Hope even blinked.
"If your grip slips for so much as a second inside that graveyard," Klaus said softly, stepping close enough that his golden eyes bored straight into mine, "there will not be a corner of this earth where you can hide from me."
"Relax, Dad, I've got the best grip in northern California and southern Louisiana combined," I told him, winking once at Hope before looking toward the open gates. "Come on—let's go ruin a church service."
***
Hope
Lafayette Cemetery at nine o'clock at night looked like the inside of a furnace.
Three blocks out from Washington Avenue, the humid air was already thick with rolling gray-violet smoke pouring out of the high wrought-iron gates and drifting low between the whitewashed above-ground tombs. Every streetlamp along the perimeter had burst from the pressure of the ancestral magic, and inside the brick walls, a dozen witch fires burned green and copper at the intersections of the gravel paths.
Stiles didn't slow down when we hit the front gates.
We ran side by side down the center of the street—Klaus, Elijah, and Marcel peeling off to the left and right to vault the ten-foot brick walls into the outer rows of tombs where a dozen Ninth Ward witches and eight rogue nightwalkers they'd hired as muscle were holding the perimeter.
Stiles kept his left hand locked around my right wrist as we hit the locked iron gates at full speed.
He didn't bother picking the lock or siphoning the gate hinge; he just kicked the center clasp with the flat of his sneaker. Two hundred pounds of wrought iron tore straight out of the masonry pillars and went spinning end-over-end down the central gravel avenue, mowing down two chanting witches before they even finished turning their heads.
"Honey, we're home!" Stiles shouted into the rolling purple smoke, pulling me smoothly around a marble angel statue as the third pulse of the plague censer echoed out from the massive Greek-revival vault at the center of the graveyard.
The shockwave of toxic magic slammed through the fog toward my chest—and before it even made my throat tighten, Stiles squeezed my fingers hard, drawing the entire wave of septic ash straight through my palm into his arm and converting it into a roaring surge of raw power that flowed right back into my veins as pure, clean heat.
"God, that thing tastes like a wet ashtray," Stiles muttered, his eyes glowing bright crimson-gold through the smoke as four rogue vampires dropped from the roofs of the surrounding crypts onto the gravel path twenty feet ahead of us, while three witches atop the neighboring family vaults raised their hands to drop a crushing gravity hex on our heads. "Want the ones on the ground or the ones on the roofs?"
"Roofs," I said, a fierce, electric rush singing through my blood as the purified magic Stiles had just cycled back into me made every nerve in my body feel ten times stronger than normal.
I raised my free left hand toward the three witches chanting on top of the limestone crypts and flicked my fingers upward.
*"Phasmatos motus incendia!"*
I didn't just throw a fireball; fueled by the overflow of Stiles's siphon still pouring warm through our joined hands, a thirty-foot arc of white-gold lightning and wildfire erupted from my palm, ripping the marble roof slabs out from under the three witches and blasting them backward into the magnolia trees in a shower of sparks and scorched stone.
"Show-off!" Stiles laughed, not letting go of my hand for a fraction of a second as the four vampires on the gravel path blurred straight at us with iron cleavers and chains.
Watching Stiles fight from twenty feet away had been impressive; fighting right beside him while holding his hand was like being tethered to a tornado.
He moved in perfect sync with my stride, never once pulling my arm hard enough to throw me off balance. As the first two vampires lunged from my left and his right, Stiles stepped half a pace ahead, caught the first vampire by the throat with his free right hand, and bit straight through the guy's jugular—tearing the front of his neck out in a hot spray of blood while injecting enough venom to drop the body twitching onto the gravel.
The second vampire swung a heavy iron cleaver toward my shoulder.
Before I even had to throw up a shield, Stiles spun us in a tight, fluid half-circle like we were dancing, using the momentum to plant a back-kick into the cleaver-wielding vampire's knee—snapping the leg backward with a gunshot crack—while I slashed my free hand across the air and sent a razor-sharp wave of telekinetic force that took the vampire's head clean off at the collarbone.
The remaining two nightwalkers tried to come at us low from behind a marble sarcophagus.
Stiles didn't even break his conversation with me. "Watch the puddle on your left, those boots are suede," he said, guiding me one step sideways as he slammed his heel down onto the edge of a six-hundred-pound granite tomb cover lying beside the path, flipping the stone slab upright into the air and punching it square in the center with his bare fist.
The granite slab shot forward like a battering ram, flattening both lunging vampires into the brick wall of the neighboring vault with a wet, bone-shattering *thud* that painted the whitewash dark red.
Two rows over, through the swirling purple smoke, I could hear my dad and Elijah tearing through the outer perimeter guards while Marcel ripped the boundary totems off the north wall.
Ahead of us, thirty yards down the main gravel avenue, stood the central society tomb where the thick, choking plume of violet smoke was pouring out of the bronze doors.
Standing on the marble steps in front of the tomb entrance was Celestine—a tall woman in a blood-splattered white linen dress, her hands black with soot up to the elbows as she swung a heavy, skull-sized brass censer on three silver chains, while four older Ninth Ward elders chanted around a basin of burning distillery ash at her feet.
When Celestine saw the two of us walking untouched out of the smoke—Stiles with blood on his jaw and a grin on his face, and me without so much as a cough, our joined hands glowing like a miniature sun between us—the triumphant snarl froze on her face.
"Impossible!" Celestine shouted, her voice cracking as she swung the smoking brass censer directly toward us and screamed the final binding phrase in old Creole French. "The distillery ash carries both their blood! Burn the tether out of their lungs!"
A massive, concentrated cloud of black-violet plague fire roared out of the swinging thurible, rushing down the narrow path between the tombs like an avalanche aimed straight at my heart.
***
Stiles
Okay, I'm not an expert on seventeenth-century French plague censer etiquette, but if a guy walks through four of your perimeter guards and three roof-witches while holding hands with his girlfriend and eating your spell like cotton candy, throwing *more* of the same spell at him is just poor critical thinking.
As the black-violet wave of consecrated ash and blood-rot roared down the gravel path toward us, I stepped directly in front of Hope—keeping my left hand locked warm and tight around hers behind my hip—and held my right arm out toward the oncoming cloud.
"Deep breath, Hope," I called over my shoulder as the plague fire hit my palm.
I opened the siphon wide enough to rattle the iron gates at both ends of the cemetery.
Instead of letting the cloud touch Hope, I dragged the entire thirty-foot wall of cursed smoke straight into the palm of my right hand.
For two full seconds, the sheer volume of ancestral hate, yellow-fever rot, and consecrated bone ash pouring out of that brass thurible lit up every single vein in my body from my collarbones to my cheekbones in blinding, radioactive crimson. It felt like drinking molten lead out of a blast furnace—heavy, vicious, and fighting to tear my arteries open from the inside.
Behind me, Hope didn't let me take the weight alone.
She pressed her body flush against my back, wrapping her free left arm around my ribs and resting her palm flat over my racing heart while her other hand stayed laced with mine.
Instantly, the pure, wildfire heat of her tribrid magic surged into my chest, meeting the black plague magic inside my bloodstream and incinerating the poison out of the spell before it could even slow my heart down.
When the smoke cleared from the gravel path three seconds later, the cemetery had gone dead quiet.
Klaus, Elijah, and Marcel stood twenty yards away atop the neighboring crypts, blood dripping from their hands among the bodies of the perimeter guards, watching as the last ribbon of purple smoke vanished into my palm.
On the marble steps of the society tomb, the four Ninth Ward elders were on their knees gasping for air, and Celestine was staring in horror at the brass censer in her hands—its coals gone cold and black, drained of every last drop of three hundred years of stored dark magic.
"Huh," I said, flexing my right hand as a ring of red-gold sparks danced harmlessly across my knuckles and my grin came back twice as wide. "Little smoky on the finish, kind of a mesquite barbecue vibe, not bad! Wait—is that all you brought, Celestine? Because you dragged us out right in the middle of dessert, and I was only halfway through my second cannoli."
Celestine backed up a step against the bronze doors of the tomb, snatching a consecrated silver athame from her belt with trembling fingers. "You—you aren't natural! The ancestors—"
"Oh, don't get me started on your ancestors," I sighed, finally letting go of Hope's hand now that the censer was dead and strolling lazily up the marble steps toward Celestine while Hope walked up right beside me. "Seriously, every time I talk to a witch in this town, it's *the ancestors this* and *the ancestors that*. Newsflash: your ancestors are dead, which means if they were so smart, they would've figured out how to not be dead!"
One of the four kneeling elders on the left lunged upward, throwing a handful of blinding hex-salt at Hope's face.
I didn't even let a grain of it get within three feet of her.
My hand blurred sideways, catching the elder by the jaw before the salt left his palm, and I shoved him face-first through the solid bronze doors of the tomb behind him. The metal doors caved inward with a deafening *clang*, and the elder didn't make another sound.
Beside me on the steps, Hope raised her hand toward the other three elders who were scrambling to draw another circle on the marble. With a sharp twist of her wrist, she snapped the stone steps beneath their knees and sent all three of them flying headfirst into the granite pillars across the avenue, knocking them out cold in a single heartbeat.
That left just Celestine, pinned between the twisted bronze doors of the vault and me.
Up on the crypt roof twenty yards back, Klaus called out smoothly: "Leave her breathing for a moment, Stiles. Freya will want to know if any other covens in the Ninth Ward had a hand in opening the Regent vaults."
I paused two feet in front of Celestine, glancing back over my shoulder at Klaus with my eyebrows raised. "Wait, really? We're doing an interrogation? Because she just tried to fill Hope's lungs with yellow fever and distillery dirt, and honestly, my interrogation style is more *ask questions never, bite immediately*."
"Five minutes of answers," Elijah said from the tomb roof opposite Klaus, wiping his hands with his pocket square. "After which, I assure you, neither my brother nor I will object to whatever culinary or decorative use you find for her."
I looked back at Celestine. Her heart was hammering at two hundred beats a minute against her ribs, sweat pouring down her temples as she stared at the blood on my shirt and the twin sets of fangs sliding down behind my smile.
"Okay, Celestine, you heard the man in the nice suit," I said cheerfully, leaning one forearm against the marble tomb doorframe right beside her head. "My future father-in-law wants to know who else has a key to the spooky basement in St. Louis Number One. Talk fast, and maybe you just get locked in a dungeon instead of becoming a late-night snack."
Behind me on the steps, I heard Klaus let out a low, dangerous growl at *future father-in-law*, while Hope choked back a laugh that made her shoulders shake.
Instead of answering, Celestine spat a mouthful of blood onto the marble at my feet, her eyes wild and fanatical. "No one else opened the vault! And it won't matter what you do to me—every witch in New Orleans felt that censer burn tonight! They know the tribrid has tied her blood to an abomination, and they'll never stop coming for her until—"
"Okay, boring, repetitive, and honestly rude," I interrupted, rolling my eyes. "Hey, Klaus! She said nobody else had a key! Five minutes is up!"
Before Klaus could even reply, I grabbed the three silver chains of the heavy brass plague censer still hanging from Celestine's wrist, looped the chains once around her throat, and yanked backward.
Metal and bone crunched together as her head came clean off her shoulders, rolling down the marble steps to land at the edge of the gravel path while I let her body slump inside the dark doorway of the society tomb.
I wiped a stray splatter of red off my cheek with the back of my wrist, breathing out a long, satisfied sigh as the quiet settled back over Lafayette Cemetery.
"Clean sweep," I announced, turning back down the steps toward Hope as Marcel jumped down from the crypt wall to check the unconscious elders by the pillars. "Everybody's lungs work, the spooky incense burner is officially retired, and we didn't even get graveyard mud on your suede boots. How's your chest feel?"
Hope walked up the bottom two marble steps until she was standing at eye level with me, the moonlight breaking through the clearing smoke overhead to catch the warm amber-blue glow of her eyes.
"Stronger than before we got here," she said softly, reaching up to brush a smudge of soot off my collarbone with her thumb. "You burned through a three-hundred-year-old plague hex and used it to charge both of us."
"Waste not, want not," I grinned, catching her hand against my chest and pressing a quick kiss to her knuckles right in front of her dad, her uncle, and Marcel. "Though I gotta be honest with you—burning three hundred years of dead witch bad vibes out of my system definitely works up an appetite."
Across the gravel path, Klaus stepped down from the marble vault, his hybrid eyes narrowing immediately as he heard the drop in my voice and saw the way Hope looked up at me on the steps.
"The compound is six blocks away," Klaus said pointedly, striding over to stand at the foot of the stairs. "And you have yet to finish the dinner you were invited to, Mr. Stilinski."
I looked at Klaus, then back at Hope, whose lips curved into a small, wicked smile that looked dangerously like mine.
"Actually, Dad," Hope said, keeping her hand tucked warmly in mine as she looked over her shoulder at her father, "my magic is still running a little hot from the censer spillover. Stiles and I are going to take the long way back by the river so he can balance the rest of the charge."
Klaus stared at his daughter for three long seconds—knowing full well what *balancing the charge* meant, and knowing just as clearly that neither iron gates nor parental lectures were going to keep the two of us apart tonight.
Beside Klaus, Elijah cleared his throat faintly, adjusting his cuffs. "I believe Freya will require our assistance cataloguing the remaining artifacts in the St. Louis vault, Niklaus. Before another fool attempts to light a candle in our parish."
Klaus's jaw tightened once before he gave a single, sharp nod toward me. "Midnight, Stiles. Have her inside the compound gates by midnight, or I will personally test whether a 1980 Jeep can survive being dropped from the Crescent City Connection."
"Not the Jeep, man, that's below the belt!" I called after him with a laugh as Klaus, Elijah, and Marcel turned down the central avenue with the three captured elders in tow, leaving the quiet, moonlit cemetery to the two of us.
***
Hope
As soon as their footsteps faded beyond the iron gates on Washington Avenue, the stillness of the city wrapped around us.
We didn't stay in the graveyard. Stiles led me out through the side gate onto the quiet, oak-lined streets of the Garden District, where massive antebellum mansions sat back behind wrought-iron fences and hundred-year-old live oaks draped in Spanish moss turned the sidewalk into a tunnel of silver and shadow.
Two blocks down Prytania, my boots hadn't even slowed down before Stiles tugged gently on my hand, drawing me into the deep, hidden courtyard garden of a shuttered conservatory bordered by brick walls and overgrown night-blooming jasmine.
The moment the iron gate clicked shut behind us, my back hit the warm brick wall under the shadow of a magnolia tree, and Stiles's mouth was on mine.
All the adrenaline from the cemetery—the roar of wildfire and lightning we'd thrown together, the rush of his siphon pulling the poison out of my lungs and turning it into pure, liquid power in our veins—spilled over at once.
I gasped against his mouth, wrapping both arms around his neck and arching into him as his hands slid under the hem of my emerald silk top, his palms burning hot against the bare skin of my waist and lower back.
"God, watching you blow those three witches off that roof," Stiles breathed roughly against my lips, kissing a scorching line down my jaw to the hollow beneath my ear while his heart hammered fast and heavy against my ribs, "was genuinely the hottest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Tell me you felt that when the lightning hit."
"I felt you pouring the whole censer behind it," I whispered, my fingers tangling hard in his dark hair as a shiver raced down my spine from the brush of his fangs against my jawline. "Stiles—my magic feels like it's going to set the trees on fire if you don't take some of it down."
Under my skin, the excess power from the three-hundred-year-old artifact he'd purified was humming so bright and hot that tiny golden sparks were literally jumping from the ends of my hair against the brick wall behind us.
Stiles lifted his head just enough to look into my eyes in the moonlight filtering through the magnolia leaves.
His irises were pure, glowing crimson-gold, dark veins ridging faintly beneath his cheekbones as the wolf, the vampire, and the siphoner rose straight to the surface—not hiding a single piece of the monster he was, and looking at me with a fierce, consuming tenderness that stole the breath right out of my lungs.
"I've got you," he murmured, his voice dropping into a low velvet purr as his left hand slid up my ribs to cup the back of my neck, tilting my head gently against his palm while his right hand braced against the brick beside my shoulder. "Give it to me."
I tilted my throat up to his mouth, my eyes fluttering shut for half a second as his lips parted against my pulse point and his fangs sank deep into my vein.
A low, breathless moan tore from my throat before I could stop it, muffled against his shoulder as I hooked one leg around his hip and pulled him hard against me.
Tonight wasn't gentle like the rooftop, and it wasn't quiet like the penthouse before dawn.
With the massive charge of purified magic still surging through both our veins from the cemetery, the second my blood poured across Stiles's tongue, the resonance loop between us ignited like lightning hitting high-octane fuel.
I felt every swallow down to my toes—the hot, rhythmic pull of his mouth at my neck drawing the overflowing heat out of my blood, and the immediate, molten wave of his siphon pushing pure, dark euphoria straight back through his palms into my skin. My nails dug through the cotton of his black shirt into the hard muscle of his back as wave after wave of golden-red light pulsed between our chests, making my head spin and my whole body tremble against his until I couldn't tell where my heartbeat ended and his began.
Stiles groaned deep in his chest, his hips pressing me firmer into the warm brick wall as he drank one last deep, slow swallow from my throat before withdrawing his fangs and licking the puncture clean.
Before my vision had even stopped swimming from the rush of the bite, his mouth came back up to capture mine—hot, metallic-sweet with the taste of our shared blood, and so fiercely possessive that my knees nearly gave out when my boot touched the flagstones again.
He kept me pinned gently between his chest and the wall, breathing hard against my mouth as the golden sparks around our shoulders finally settled into a warm, steady glow beneath our skin.
"Okay," Stiles rasped against my lips, resting his forehead against mine while his thumb stroked slowly up and down my bare ribcage under my silk top. "Change of plans. Forget the Monteleone. I'm buying a house on this street tomorrow morning so we can do that every time somebody tries to hex us."
I let out a soft, breathless laugh, resting my cheek against his chest right over the steady, powerful thump of his heart while the scent of night-blooming jasmine and woodsmoke drifted around us in the dark.
"My dad gave us until midnight," I murmured, looking up at him through my lashes. "It's only ten-fifteen."
Stiles looked down at me, that crooked, hilarious, razor-sharp grin spreading across his face as he smoothed my silk top back down over my waist and laced his fingers tightly through mine.
"An hour and forty-five minutes in New Orleans with no adult supervision?" Stiles said brightly, pushing off the brick wall and pulling me toward the garden gate. "Come on, Mikaelson—I know an all-night jazz club on Frenchmen where the trombone player actually knows his scales, and if any nightwalkers look at us funny on the way there, I'll let you pick which roof we throw them onto."
I smiled, tightening my grip on his hand as we stepped out onto the moonlit sidewalk together—two monsters in the dark, completely unbroken, with the whole city ahead of us.