Chapter 1: The Hunt and the Feast
The air in Dusty’s Last Stand was thick enough to chew. Neon buzz painted everything in a sickly, intermittent red, flickering over sticky floors and scarred tabletops. Cigarette smoke coiled around the pool table’s hanging lamp, and the jukebox fought a losing battle against the roar of leather-clad voices and cracking billiard balls.
In a shadowed booth wedged between a broken cigarette machine and the hall to the toilets, Klaus Mikaelson watched the room like a wolf observing a sheepfold. His blue-green eyes, cold and assessing, tracked the ebb and flow of meaningless human drama. A thousand years had taught him the patterns were always the same: aggression, negotiation, submission. It was boring.
Until her.
Hannah stood at the bar, a slice of strange moonlight in the gloom. Her glamour was perfect—to any human, she was just a pale girl with weird hair and a tight black dress. But Klaus could see the subtle shimmer at the edges, the slight warping of light around her shoulder blades where magnificent wings were folded away, feel the faint, tempting pulse of otherworldly energy she emanated. It was a siren’s call to predators. And in here, predators wore denim and chain wallets.
She was hunting.
He saw her focus settle on a mountain of a man near the dartboard. Tattoos sleeved his thick arms; a leather vest strained over his back. He was laughing too loud, shoving one of his buddies. All brute force and no finesse. Perfect for what she needed.
Klaus took a slow sip of his bourbon, the amber liquid doing nothing for him. This was the real drink. The spectacle.
Hannah slid off her stool and moved with a liquid grace that made the clumsy movements of the bar’s patrons look like a bad parody of life. She didn’t walk to the man; she appeared beside him, as if materializing from the smoke. He looked down, his piggy eyes widening at the unexpected beauty in his orbit.
“Buy me a drink?” Her voice was a low hum, barely audible over the music, but Klaus caught it. It was the sound of velvet wrapped around steel.
The biker, his name was probably Dave or Brett or something equally forgettable, leered. “What’s a thing like you drinking in a place like this?”
“Something strong.” She smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. It was a promise of teeth. “I feel like getting dirty.”
That was all it took. Five minutes of murmured negotiation, a hand placed on a meaty forearm, a tilt of her head toward the back door. The man followed like a dog on a scent, his buddies whooping as he trailed the little white-haired fantasy into the darkness.
Klaus set his glass down silently. He became shadow, slipping from the booth and through the crowd, a phantom no one noticed. He pushed open the heavy back door, the thump-thump of the music fading into the humid, garbage-scented night of the alley.
It was a cathedral of decay. Brick walls wept with grime. A single bulb above a locked service door buzzed, fighting a feeble fight against the dark. The primary source of illumination was the blinking neon from the bar’s sign, painting everything in pulses of hellish pink.
And there they were.
He’d bent her over a rusted dumpster, its surface sticky and cold. Her dress was shoved up around her waist, his big hands gripping the flare of her hips hard enough to bruise a human. Her face was turned to the side, cheek pressed against the filthy metal, her violet eyes open and staring right at Klaus in the shadows. There was no fear in them. Only a deep, bottomless hunger.
The man fumbled with his belt, his jeans already around his thick thighs. “Gonna wreck this tight little ass,” he grunted, spitting into his palm before slicking himself. He was thick, veined, and brutally hard. He didn’t ask, didn’t prepare her. He just positioned the head against her and shoved forward with a single, brutal thrust.
Hannah’s back arched. A sharp gasp was torn from her, but it twisted into a moan of pure, unadulterated pleasure. Her eyes rolled back for a second before fixing on Klaus again, gleaming. The man started a brutal, piston-like rhythm, each drive of his hips slamming her into the dumpster with a metallic bang. The sounds were obscene: wet, slapping flesh, his guttural curses, her ragged, eager cries.
“Yeah, take it, you filthy bitch,” the biker snarled, one hand fisting in her white hair, yanking her head back. “Love it, don’t you? Feel how fucking deep I am?”
“Yes,” she hissed, the word a prayer. “More.”
Klaus watched, fascinated. He could see the energy transfer, a visible shimmer in the air around them to his ancient eyes. The man’ vital, brutish life force, his aggressive sexual energy, was being siphoned, drawn into her through the violent connection. She was feeding, and the rougher he was, the richer the feast. Her hidden tail, still glamoured, would be twitching with ecstasy; her sensitive wings would be trembling. She was built for this. Designed to find pleasure in any penetration, to stretch and accommodate and devour.
But the man was flagging. The draining was swift. His thrusts became less powerful, his curses slurred. “The fuck… feel weird…” he mumbled, his grip on her hair slackening.
This was the vulnerable moment. The moment between satiation for her and death for him. Klaus moved.
Soundless, he crossed the alley. He didn’t grab the man. He simply pressed his body against the biker’s broad, sweaty back, his hand snaking around to clamp firmly over the man’s mouth, stifling any cry. The biker jolted, tried to struggle, but he was weak from the feed and pinned between two supernatural forces.
Klaus met Hannah’s gaze over the man’s shoulder. Her lips were parted, breath coming in quick pants. She gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod.
With his other hand, Klaus opened his own fly. He was already hard—the violence, the display, the raw power of the scene had stirred him. He positioned himself and, in one smooth, savage thrust, buried himself to the hilt in the man’s ass.
The biker screamed against Klaus’s palm, his body seizing. Klaus set a vicious, punishing rhythm, fucking into him with the same force the man had used on Hannah. The synergy was darkly perfect: each of Klaus’s drives pushed the biker deeper into Hannah, creating a brutal chain of motion. She cried out, a sound of exquisite fulfillment.
Klaus leaned in, his lips brushing the man’s sweaty, tattooed neck. He could smell the blood, the adrenaline, the fading life. “My turn,” Klaus whispered, his voice a dark rumble.
Then he let his face change. Veins of darkness spiderwebbed beneath his eyes, his fangs erupted, long and lethal. He sank them into the man’s throat.
The taste was explosive—copper, salt, and the fading burn of cheap whiskey. The blood was rich with terror and dying anger, a potent vintage. He drank deeply, his hips never ceasing their relentless motion. The man’s struggles became weak twitches, then nothing. Klaus drank until the heart fluttered and stopped.
He pulled out, letting the corpse slump to the greasy asphalt with a dull thud. He straightened his clothes, his face smoothing back to its handsome, predatory calm.
Hannah was still leaning against the dumpster, shuddering through the last waves of her feed, her body thrumming with stolen energy and sexual aftershocks. She slowly pushed herself upright, letting her dress fall down. She turned, her violet eyes luminous in the dark, her gaze traveling from the dead man at her feet to Klaus.
He reached out, not with tenderness, but with possession. His thumb wiped a smear of something—grime, sweat, maybe a trace of blood—from her lower lip. She didn’t flinch.
“Messy,” he said, his voice low.
“Efficient,” she corrected, her own voice hoarse. She leaned into his touch for a second, a creature of hunger acknowledging a bigger, hungrier beast. “He gave me what I needed. You took what you wanted.”
Klaus’s smile was a razor cut in the night. “And what did you want, little hybrid? Beyond the meal?”
She looked at the body, then back at him, the glamour around her solidifying once more, hiding the magnificent, sinful creature beneath. “To not be alone when I did it.”
The silence that fell between them wasn’t empty. It was full of understanding, of a shared language of craving that transcended species or morality. He offered his arm, not like a gentleman, but like a king offering a place beside him to a useful pet.
She took it.
Together, they stepped over the drained man and walked back into the thrumming light of the bar, leaving the alley to its darkness and its newest, silent occupant. The night, and the road ahead, was long. And they were both, perpetually, hungry.