I remembered those days. Not so long ago, really. My alpha said jump, and I jumped, every time, and adored him for it. Abuse was still attention. We all competed for his attention, and sometimes the best way to get it was by showing your belly faster than anyone else. It was all tied up in sex, ego, and control, and when I was first brought into the pack, I was a sheltered suburban kid who’d never been exposed to that kind of world. I didn’t know what else to do but what I was told. I was older now. I’d seen a lot more. I knew a lot more. I didn’t have to lie back and take it if I didn’t want to.

Inside me, Wolf whined. Just a little bit. “That’s awfully presumptuous of you.”

“You don’t deny it.”

“And what do you expect me to do now, show you my throat and beg for it?”

He didn’t wait for me to show it to him. He took it, pitching forward, bracing one arm behind my back, and putting his mouth over my neck while his other hand held my breast. He kissed, sucked, nibbled, while pulling me close to him, like he could swallow me with his body. Pointed canine teeth—thick, like fangs—pressed into my skin. I flushed, heat and anger spreading from my gut through my whole body.

Then I thought: great. He wanted to rape me right here, in front of all his followers, and maybe he’d give them all a go at me. It settled me a little bit. Settled me enough. Because if that was all he did, all they did to me, I’d survive it. I knew I could survive it and get over it. It wouldn’t be the worst that could happen.

Didn’t mean I had to sit back and take it, either. There was a time when I would have. I laughed a little, at how far I had traveled since those days. It wasn’t nice, happy laughter. It was mocking. That made him pause; he must not have understood how I could possibly resist his ministrations. How I could not simply fall back into the role of the submissive, chained to the wall like so much meat, begging for more more more.

I may have been chained up, but when he pulled away, I knew I had a little bit of control. A tiny little bit. I could work with that. He looked at me, studying me, as if he could see what I was thinking. His eyes had turned an inhuman shade of green, glowing almost, slitted, smug like a cat’s.

I smiled. “Actually, I don’t miss it. My alpha always managed to ignore my safe word.”

Then I kicked. Braced against the chains and swung up, as hard as I could, realizing I probably couldn’t do much damage—especially since his followers were arrayed behind him, watching and waiting. The shackles cut into my wrists.

My kick caught Balthasar in the gut. He fell back but quickly regained his balance. I didn’t wait, kicking again, aiming for his face. He scrambled back, batting my foot away, and bared his teeth, which were sharper than they had been. Inside me, Wolf howled, cheering. She was close to punching through my control. My shoulders strained, pulled back at the wrong angle for Wolf’s body. If we changed now, it would hurt, far worse than usual. I hung there, gasping, legs bent and ready to kick again, panting, feeling fur at the surface of my skin.

I didn’t know what to expect. Some men might have hit me, frustrated that I’d slipped out of their control. He might have laughed and kept on with the rape. His face was a mask. Right up until he smiled. Like a Cheshire cat.

He announced to his followers. “She’s ready. It’s time.”

Huh?

The henchmen snapped the chains from their hooks, peeled me off the wall, and trussed me up for another round of dragging. This time, I was mostly upright, mostly face forward, so I could sort of see where we were going. Where we were going was through a doorway, a different one than they’d brought me through, as far as I could tell.

We emerged onto the stage for the Balthasar, King of Beasts show. The ziggurat loomed before us.

This had to be a joke.

The stage was dark except for lit torches. Real ones this time, pitch and flame, not the gaslit ones for the show. This close, they stank of burning tar and filled the air with smoke that made my eyes water. Patterns in the fake stone of the ziggurat emerged, images in relief that seemed to move in the flickering firelight. They were like the pictures from Balthasar’s suite: processions of oxen with the heads of men, stalking lions, bird-people, and nameless demons continued here, but they were more complex, more threatening.

They dragged me to the front of the ziggurat, to the two stone pillars where Balthasar was chained for the show. But that was a show, and this was real, performed in an empty theater for the troupe alone. The decor throughout the troupe’s suite and stage wasn’t for show, it wasn’t a motif or a design choice. It was the real thing. This whole place was a Babylonian temple. From hell.

They secured a chain to each pillar, leaving my arms spread wide. I thrashed against the bindings like a snared rabbit. My blood was burning.

The woman from the show, the exotic, half-clad torturer, stood nearby. This close, I could smell her. Even with all of Balthasar’s people gathered around us in a circle as if for some ritual, even with the smoking torches and the scent of my own fear filling me, I could smell the coldness of her. The deadness.

She was a vampire.

This time, she wore an undyed linen gown, a simple square tunic embroidered with more Babylonian-looking images and symbols around the hems and belted with rope. She had long black hair and skin like honey. Her eyes seemed to be rolled back in her head. She stood with her arms spread, and her left hand held a long, fierce-looking dagger.

I had a bad feeling about this.

Inside me, Wolf panicked, throwing herself against the bars of a cage that I imagined kept her locked inside of me. The bars were dissolving. My heart was racing. My skin prickled, ready to stretch, split, and set her free.

I caught sight of Balthasar, who moved before me, serenely presiding over the scene. I nodded to the woman, who hadn’t deigned to look at me yet. “So who the fuck is that?”

“She is the real Master here. She speaks to the old goddess—the oldest goddess, the one whose bones made the world. It is she we serve. We are her Band, as she had in the days before time. Tiamat!” Balthasar ended with a shout, and the others took up the word in a chant.

“Tiamat! Tiamat! Tiamat!”

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

He stepped up to me and gripped my chin hard. Growling, I bared my teeth at him. “Go on, shape-shift. We need you to shift,” he said.

“Why?”

“The sacrifice must be of a creature neither human nor animal. A being partway between them. A lycanthrope.”