by Jax Garren
“Bottom’s next in command after the pimp. Usually the pro with the most experience or who brings in the most cash,” Emma answered. “Why?”
That didn’t make sense. “How does a head prostitute have my phone number, and why is she handing it out to her… staff? Employees?” What was the right word?
“She’s handing it out because she trusts you.” Her tone turned cool. “Why a street whore has your number is your business not mine, though I will point out we have perfectly lovely and well-treated ladies at Scarlet.” The high-end blood brothel CoVIn vampires used when they weren’t in the mood for hunting down a “dinner date,” as they called a hookup with biting. Like Javier had been.
He stopped. “I didn’t hire a hooker.”
She shrugged nonchalantly, but she didn’t slow down either, and he had to run to catch up as they crossed the lot. “Not like I care none. I used to be one.” She hesitated a moment before continuing. “You should know, though, Rosie’s with Charming. Most of his girls are underage. Some of them don’t look it. Just in case you didn’t know.”
Repulsed by the implication, he grabbed her elbow, forcing her to stop and turn around. “I don’t hire whores, underage or otherwise.” Why did it matter so much what she thought? Norepinephrine. Oxytocin. Serotonin. He let her go and headed for his car. Nobody who thought he’d hire an underage street prostitute knew the first thing about him. “Seriously, what kind of shitty person do you think I am?”
“Every man hires a whore sometime or another.”
“No. We don’t all do that.”
“Every man I ever known does. What makes you so special?”
He grunted in frustration. “Have you considered that as a prostitute, your sample set is biased?”
Before he could think, she had his shirt in her hand and his back against the wall. “I ain’t taken no coin in a hundred and sixty-four years. So you just shut your fucking mouth.”
His eyes widened in shock as he thought over what he’d said… and realized he’d implied she was still working. What he’d said wasn’t okay, but she was always so open and carefree about her past that her reaction surprised him.
Cash’s Cheshire cat grin appeared over her shoulder. “We interrupt this domestic dispute to bring you…” He thumbed toward a corner of the garage. “Transportation.”
Emma laughed, like she hadn’t just shoved Javier into a wall, and dusted off his shirt. “You ain’t disturbing nothing. Everything’s cool, sweet cheeks. I take it you got my text.”
Cash might be everyone else’s favorite vampire, but he was feeding off Rhi, and Emma never called him anything but “sweet cheeks.” Javier had a hard time looking at him with anything shy of seething rage.
“I had a meeting. I decided to skip it for zombies and hookers.” Cash tossed a fob to Emma and held another up, as if to drop it into Javier’s hand. “Hear you’re the new person of interest with the local street molls. You know we have better—”
Javier couldn’t keep his fists from clenching. “I don’t need a car. I have my own.” And I don’t hire prostitutes.
Cash nodded his chin toward a corner of the garage. “Not as much fun though.”
Javier looked, ready to protest. Then he saw three Dodge Tomahawks—the not-even-a-little-street-legal fastest motorcycle in the world. His jaw opened with speed lust. He’d wanted to drive the bizarre-looking, four-wheeled superbike since high school, when it’d first been introduced.
“Too much adrenaline for ya, doc?”
Javier held out his hand, gone from disdainful to almost—almost—ready to beg the prince for a chance to drive one.
Instead of dropping the fob, Cash tossed it away from the bikes. It spun in the air, arcing high. “Last one out the door pays for gas.”
Without thinking Javier jumped for it and found himself ten feet across the floor, keys in hand. Vampire strength. He didn’t use it that often. He looked at the bike. Something that powerful was dangerous for a human, but for a vampire? It was perfect.
Cash grinned a challenge and was suddenly on a bike. Emma slid onto a second and roared the motor to life. Javier sprinted to the third. There was no way for him to win. Unless…
Cash’s hands were busy starting his engine, so Javier unlatched the holster keeping the ax on Cash’s back. The weapon started to slip. In his surprise Cash scrambled to catch it. “You motherfucker,” the prince called after him, but he was laughing. Good to know Cash could take it as well as dish it out.
Javier’s engine purred and sang at the touch of a button, and he groaned at the sweet roar of power. So. Fucking. Awesome. A mere caress to the accelerator and it jerked forward. He twitched the handlebars, rounding through the garage. The thing handled like perfection, and he accelerated, trailing inches behind Emma. Behind him, Cash’s engine finally growled. Another tight corner, leaning so low his shirt brushed the concrete, and they were outside.
He jammed the throttle, and the g-force slammed into him as wind ripped through his hair. Adrenaline sang through his veins, the good kind that made his head spin and the cares of the world fall away. He felt his fangs come down, and the world turned bright, colors sharper, scents more acute. He accelerated, heart pounding faster as his vampire senses let him speed, turn, and play in ways he never could as a human. Frustration to anger, and now this. Oh, he hadn’t felt this high in years.
For once, being a vampire was more than stitching up corpses in record time or smelling diseases he couldn’t see. Being a vampire was racing through the night with friends—or acquaintances—and a mission. Being a vampire was power.
* * *
Emma should have been keeping her attention on the road—last time she’d checked, the speedometer was edging toward three hundred, fast even for her reflexes—but she couldn’t stop watching Javier. A grin lit his face as his hair danced in a black aura around his head. She’d never seen him look so happy.
A lump formed in her chest. They could be that ride together, chasing the night at breakneck speed. The vibration of the bike and the adrenaline of the wind brought the memory of his hands, smooth and confident on her body. She might like it if he rode behind her on the bike. The bike kept her stretched forward, so he’d practically lie on top of her, pressing her against the shivering metal. Normally she wasn’t a fan of being trapped—too many memories. But in her imagination, Javier held her steady as every reverberation of the engine throbbed against her body. In her imagination, there was no need for resentment, because pleasing herself was the point.
Cash slowed as he pulled off the main road into a planned community that was more construction than neighborhood. Emma followed, shaking clear of the vision as not-so-pleasant reality set back in. Houses that all looked alike creeped her out with their Stepford uniformity. You never knew what freak flags flew behind the flimsy gauze of respectability. The skeletal beginnings, the stud-and-pipe bones of homes rising two stories in all directions, didn’t help. Nor did the wind, sighing through the hewn wood, or the slow crawl that their ride had become.
She turned back to Javier, allowing his glow to suffuse her. Being a vampire was fun. Maybe she could help him enjoy it more.
“Yo, Em,” Cash said over the noise of the bikes. “I know your baby bat’s looking hella hot with the windblown thing, but have you seen your lady of the night?”
Javier’s neck whipped around, his smile disappearing in an instant. “Uncalled for.” Cash ignored him.
Emma stuck her tongue out at Cash, and he kissed the air in her direction. She studied their surroundings, looking for movement. “There.” She took the lead, heading for bright eyes in the darkness. As she neared, a baby’s cry added to the symphony of bikes. Emma parked hers and ran. Behind her the other bikes stopped roaring.
There was Rosalie, bouncing a wailing baby. Rosalie had her back pressed into a half-finished corner of the house, and her eyes darted around fearfully. From all accounts, Rosalie was brave and brazen as sin—traits necessary in their line
of work—but at Emma’s approach she screamed.
Emma raised her hands. “Rosalie, it’s Emma. From Empower. S’okay.” The girl cried harder and flung herself forward into Emma’s chest, for once acting like the kid she really was. Carefully, Emma patted her curls, trying to calm her without startling her. The baby squirmed between them, howling. What was she doing with a baby at a job?
“It’s after me,” Rosalie said. “It’s gonna hear the baby and come after me, but I couldn’t leave their baby to get eaten.”
“What’s after you?” The girl’s outfit, already barely there, was ripped and hanging by one shoulder. The other shoulder was wet with blood. “You’ve been hurt.”
“Scratched me. I’m afraid I got the virus.”
Javier’s shoes tapped on the concrete foundation as he arrived on scene with Cash. “What virus?”
“Who he?” the girl asked.
“Javi—Dr. Reyes. You called him. And this is my friend Cash—he’s a soldier who can protect us. You’re in safe hands. What virus?”
“I told you! Zombie virus! I don’t want to be no zombie.” She stiffened. “Shit, I want my mama. I need to tell her I’m sorry.”
Cash shook his head, gaze scanning for an enemy. Thanks to the motorcycles, it had been less than ten minutes from call to arrival. The monster, whatever it was, could still be out there. “Movie zombies aren’t real. If the dead always rose as your allies, you would win—zombies are unstoppable.”
“It was a zombie! I know what I saw.”
Javier kept his voice neutral. “Did it try to choke anyone?”
Emma hummed in surprise. He was trying to connect this to Jazmin’s murder, which would be awful convenient. Unlikely—streetwalkers were in a dangerous line of work—but convenient. Although, two girls—two Empower girls—attacked in one week was more than normal.
Rosalie turned enough to look at Javier with her big brown eyes. “Choke? Zombies eat brains. It was eating brains.”
Emma frowned. “Are you sure it wasn’t drinking blood?” A Liberi vampire—the ones that lost their souls when they turned, which was most vampires—would make sense as an attacker.
“Wasn’t no vampire. It was a zombie. He bashed his wife’s head in and started…” Rosalie dropped to the ground to throw up, leaving Emma to catch the baby.
“What eats brains?” Nothing she knew of. The baby squirmed, nearly sliding from her grip. “Somebody with some vague maternal instinct take this thing.”
Cash took the squealing baby under the armpits and made a silly face as he bounced it a couple times. His voice turned downright cooing as he said, “Cassius needs to be able to reach his ax, yes he does, so you’re going to go to the good doc. Maybe one day you’ll learn to use an ax, too, and cleave through nightmares like a mighty warrior. Yeah, who’s a brave little human?” And after bopping its nose with a finger, he passed a much calmer burden to Javier.
Javier shot her a nonplussed look as Cash unlocked the strap on his ax and answered her question like that Twilight Zone interlude hadn’t happened. “A kerit. At least, they think so. If they’re real.”
“What’s a kerit?” Javier asked, cradling the infant against his shoulder like he, too, knew what he was doing. He looked sweet with a baby. Why did that not surprise her? She looked away.
Cash’s ax shone in the streetlight as he swung it, bringing Rosie’s attention to the weapon. She gasped. “The Bigfoot of Africa. Bear-monkey-hyena thing with lots of teeth. Also called a Nandi Bear.”
Javier turned to study Rosie’s wound. “Rosalie, right?” In Spanish he asked her if he could look at her arm. She relaxed at his soothing doctor’s monotone and answered back in Spanish. Without taking his eyes off his patient, Javier went back to English. “So we’re contemplating the theory that someone flew to Africa, captured Africa’s monkey-hyena-Sasquatch, and let it loose in Austin?” He carefully handed the baby back to Rosie so he could clean her wound with the med kit that Emma guessed had been in his motorcycle—Cash always had extensive healing accoutrement on hand, given his penchant for violence. “I’ll stick with fictional zombies.”
Cash’s ax clanged against the concrete as he set the shaft against the ground, relaxing his hold without dropping it. “I’m not saying it’s a kerit. I’m saying zombies, the Hollywood kind, were invented by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead. Not only are they fiction, they’re twentieth-century fiction.”
Emma didn’t care what the creature was; she just wanted the girls to be safe. Or as safe as they could be, anyway. Javier’s soft hair curled just a little, highlighting his dark eyes as he squatted down to care for a prostitute like she was any other girl with an injury. That was the way it should be. Should be but wasn’t.
“It wasn’t nothing like Bigfoot,” Rosalie said, her voice gaining power as she spoke. “It wasn’t nothing like a hyena or bear or monkey neither. My client fell dead and rose up looking for brains.”
Cash spared her a glance. “I need a better report than that. What exactly happened?”
She wiped her nose and sat on the cement, bedraggled and sad. She looked like she wanted to protest, but Javier gave her an encouraging nod. She rolled her eyes, dramatic as most teens, and started talking. “He and his wife wanted a—a together thing. I came here. They was freaky, dude. The baby was in the room. I didn’t like that, but people don’t be paying me to have opinions. I was just starting to undress when he clutched his head all of a sudden, then he passed out. His wife tried to wake him up, and he just went berserk. He and his wife was on the bed, and he done choked her, near squeezed her head right off. Then he go banging it on the wall, and she went right through it. He smashed his wife’s skull right open on the bed frame, then he started licking at it.” She shuddered. “I picked up the baby and ran.”
Emma blew out a breath. “That sounds like a zombie all right.” One straight out of Hollywood.
Rosalie turned back to Javier. “If it scratched me, am I gonna become a zombie?”
“I doubt it. No fluid transfer. Mind if I take a blood sample, though? It will help.”
Cash laughed. “Paranormal medicine, Dr. Reyes?”
“I’ve looked into it a little. Somebody needs to.”
“Gonna cure yourself?” he asked, voice snide.
“Cure…” Emma whispered, shocked at the notion. A cure for vampirism would change… everything. That should be good, Javier having the choice back that she’d taken away from him. But the vision of Javier growing old and passing hurt. It shouldn’t hurt. They didn’t know each other that well.
Javier looked up from his syringe like Cash’s suggestion had startled him too. “No. I like being… I like my life. Which is why I want to understand it better.”
Emma’s chest clenched. “You don’t hate me?” Her face burned at the slip. “Shit. I meant it. You don’t hate… it?”
Javier turned to her and his gaze froze over, shutting her out.
“What you talking about?” Rosalie asked. “What he got?”
Javier gave her a wink as he readied a needle and collection tubes. “Nothing you’re going to catch from me. Ready to see if you’ve got zombie blood?” He said that last with enough humor that Rosalie huffed a tiny laugh.
Cash stepped forward. “I’m voting evil fae.” He spun the two-bladed ax around. “Sigdrifu brandr is iron on this side, so I got it covered.”
“You’re lapsing into Norse, sweet cheeks. You happy about fighting?”
Rosalie’s nose wrinkled. “I gotta ask. Why does he have an ax?”
A snarl echoed through the lumber, raising the hair on Emma’s arm. “For the zombie.” She pulled a Colt from her pocket, wishing it were a rifle. Long distance was her preferred shot, but modern folk got a mite tetchy in the presence of an exposed long barrel.
“Dios,” Rosalie whispered, backing up with Javier’s needle still in her arm.
The thing shuffled barefoot into the half-finished room, arms limp at its sides. Its face was
covered in gore, sinewy bits dripping off its stubbled chin and clinging to a once-white undershirt. What made Emma’s skin crawl was how human it looked—tall, tan skinned, and blue eyed, hair rumpled in a trendy cut. It stopped, gaze touching each of them without interest. A groan rumbled from deep in its chest. Its jaw barely moved, giving the sound an animal quality.
Emma’s shoulders clenched. “That don’t look like no fairy I ever heard of.”
Cash slumped, the only one seemingly not afraid. “That don’t look like no fight worth my time. Seriously?” He snapped his fingers at it. “Hey. You there? Got a friend?” He stepped forward, ax dangling loosely. “Maybe ten friends?”
The thing shambled forward, arms raised like it’d walked in straight off a horror movie set.
Cash threw the ax underhand, like he was tossing a beanbag. It spun twice and slammed into the thing’s midsection, knocking it backward to the ground. “Lame.” The monster twitched as Cash crouched to take a selfie with it. “Better than a meeting, but still lame.”
“What are you doing?” Javier asked.
Cash typed on the phone. “Sig’s first kill. Gotta send a congrats to my smith.”
He was so casual, but Emma couldn’t share his ease. “You sure it’s dead?”
“You sure Vince wants corpse pictures?” Javier asked as he finished the blood draw on Rosalie.
Cash ignored Emma and answered Javier. “Why not?”
“You have met him, right? He’s going to threaten to quit.”
As the men argued, Emma knelt by the zombie and felt for a pulse. Nothing. “He’s dead.” Could it really be that easy? Her skin still shivered in nervous anticipation. It didn’t feel over.
Now that the thing was still, it looked every bit the human with a split-open gut. It didn’t bleed, like someone with a ten-inch chest wound should, and its skin was cold and already turning gray. It looked like an old death, not a person who’d just turned into this a few minutes ago. She turned to Rosalie. “Was he warm when you got here for the job?”
