Shadowglass Read Online Free PDF Page A

his silken tie loose. The stale air slicks his insides with sickness, and he longs for the cool of home, where everything smells right and he doesn’t have to pretend. But home is quiet, blank, bereft, and at least the club has sounds and people and the warm feeling of not alone on his skin.
    He could call her. Her magical bangles bind her to him. He could drag her here in minutes with the itching compulsion of thrall. But a ghost of delicious sensation tingles his skin when he thinks of her, and dirty envy leaches through his bones like poison. He doesn’t need the mirror to see Jade. He can feel exactly what she’s doing right now. Every sigh and gasp and perfect caress. She and her lover, thrall-slaves both.
    Kane’s nails blacken, and he shakes angry sparks from his hair, his flowering teeth jabbing inside his mouth. He owns her. He could make her come here with a thought. But he doesn’t want to see her flushed and alive from another man’s loving, her lips wet and her pretty hair all mussed and her flesh swollen and her skin coated in the beautiful earthy scent of her sex.
    Not when they’re together by choice. Not when she means it. She’s pleasured a thousand men at Kane’s order. This is different.
    He crunches sharp teeth, and pain flashes on his tongue, the taste of blood sour and hot like betrayal. If she can fuck around, so can he. The memory of strawberries whispers temptation into his blood, and he closes his eyes and inhales, searching for one he likes.
    Scents mix like spilled chemicals, blood and fairy dust and perfumed sweat, the dry insect smell of wing fibers, the brittle ash of a banshee’s song, the hot glassy shine of vampire eyes and skimming over it all like oily grime on a puddle, a sick celestial sweetness.
    Honey and flowers. Trouble.
    Kane’s eyes snap open, tense fingers smearing charcoal on the bar.
    They’re here. Cool white twins, their vapid stink oozing. He spied them arriving tonight, falling from the sky, splat on the ground in a shaft of fetid light like the vermin they are. This is Kane’s city now. They don’t belong here. The battle for Melbourne’s souls was over a long time ago.
    Fury flushes his brassy hair blue, and he jerks up from his stool and stalks onto the crowded floor. The saccharine reek draws him on, through the writhing crowd who shuffle aside for him without volition. Past mortals glued in hot blind embraces, past whirling fae dancers and sleepy-eyed vampires feeding slowly, draped on bloody couches. Past the corner bar where Angelo Valenti, Kane’s first vampire minion, shares dark wine with his scaly faeborn second and plots a spree of bloody DiLuca deaths now that Dante’s gone. Past the bright mirrored wall where Joey DiLuca sucks on another glowing cigarette and leather-wrapped banshee Mina radiates frustrated lust in a sleek fall of ultrablue hair.
    DiLuca maggots. He should crush them to pulp. But right now he doesn’t care.
    Beneath the mezzanine, dim and humid, shadowed bodies stretching and curling as they take their pleasure, be it chemicals, caresses, malicious fairy memory. On the floor, a dragon-tattooed banshee snorts a glittering golden line from a little mirror and passes it on, wetness glazing her eyes. A half-naked human girl moans under twin vampire boys, their fangs ripping delicately at her throat, their snowy hair shimmering in green neon as they share a bloody kiss. A shining glass fairy with silver-spun hair shoots up with glowing violet junk, color veining slowly up his translucent arm. Fairies bite, scuttle, twist each other’s bodies in drug-numbed coupling. A long wet sniff, a flutter of moist scarlet wings, sighs and groans and the dark salty taste of sex.
    In the corner, the sickly smell pools like hot sulfur, and there they stand, showered in ultraviolet from distant fluorescents, dumb like brainless insects in their stolen bodies. A dark-haired boy wearing a leather vest and buckles, strong thighs, smooth sun-browned