Harper Hall Investigations Complete Series

by Isabel Jordan

  Riddick didn’t seem open to the idea of letting Romeo ride back to their hotel in the backseat—conscious, at least—so Romeo made the trip in the trunk of the rental car, unconscious, per Riddick’s preference.

  Riddick had plucked him down from the ceiling, chains and all, punched him squarely in the jaw to knock him out, and shoved him in the trunk. It had been quite a sight.

  Harper had said there was no way a man as large as Romeo would fit in the trunk of a Ford Fusion, but Riddick had gleefully proven her wrong.

  Today’s life lesson: any car trunk can contain a dead—or half-dead—body with the proper amount of folding and shoving.

  Who knew when that info might come in handy again?

  Getting him into the hotel without having anyone call the police? Well, that had been a tad more difficult. But several bribed employees and one laundry cart later, here they were, in their room with Romeo chained to the toilet.

  Which would probably be awkward as hell later when she had to pee.

  Somewhere between the laundry cart and the toilet, Romeo roused from his Riddick-induced coma. “What do you expect to gain by keeping me chained up?” he asked her.

  She smirked and leaned over to pat his cheek, probably a little too hard to be considered playful. At least she hoped so. “A warm feeling in my heart?”

  He scowled at her, then groaned as the action no doubt hurt his busted lip. “We should be planning how you’re going to approach the boss.”

  Harper sat down on the edge of the bathtub and leaned toward him. “What makes you think we’re approaching anyone? We could just torture the antidote out of you, you know.”

  Riddick leaned against the doorjamb and cracked his knuckles. “Sounds good to me.”

  Romeo’s beaten face paled a bit, but he held her gaze steadily, despite Riddick’s menacing presence behind him. “Do your worst. If you help me or if you don’t…” He shrugged. “I’m dead either way. I’ve got nothing to lose anymore.”

  Riddick pulled his hunting knife out of his jacket and examined the blade. “Oh, I don’t know about that. A few severed appendages wouldn’t kill you.” He knelt down in front of Romeo and gave him a chilling, feral grin, like a hungry wolf about to devour a baby rabbit whole. “And in addition to making you talk, it would have the added benefit of making me deliriously happy.”

  Harper nodded solemnly. “And he really does look like he needs a laugh, doesn’t he, Romeo? Poor guy. He’s had a rough day.”

  Romeo glanced away, setting his jaw, and she almost cried out in frustration. She’d seen this look on his face before. He was determined not to talk. At this point, they could waterboard the son of a bitch with battery acid and he wouldn’t talk, just through sheer force of mulish stubbornness.

  Harper sighed. Time to abandon the game of bad cop/unhinged, psychotic cop they’d been working. “Oh, all right. Guess it’s time for plan B.”

  Now, if only she had a plan B.

  Riddick stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. “What about Hunter?”

  Not a bad idea, she decided. Given Hunter’s ability to read minds, he might be able to pluck information about the antidote right out of his head without Romeo being able to do anything to stop him.

  Romeo squashed that idea by saying, “How do you think I got clean, kiddo? I juiced.”

  Shooting up with vampire blood, or juicing, was the latest and greatest way for addicts to get clean. The blood eliminated withdrawal symptoms for nearly every drug known to man without side effects.

  Except for one tiny, almost insignificant side effect.

  An immunity to vampire mind-reading and control.

  “Shit,” Harper said. Riddick drew back his foot and gave Romeo a good, swift kick in the shin.

  “Ow!” Romeo whined. “What the fuck was that for?”

  Riddick shrugged. “Seemed like the right thing to do.”

  Harper grabbed his arm and tugged him out of the bathroom. “We’ll be back,” she told Romeo.

  “I’ll be here,” he said, dryly.

  When they were out on the balcony, Harper slid the glass door shut behind them. Riddick leaned against the railing and watched her, not bothering to even glance at the incredible light show provided by the Vegas strip below.

  “Do you have any other ideas?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I’m going to talk to the mafia and convince them to let me fight in the Arena. I’ll win, Romeo will give you the antidote, then I’ll kill him. Slowly.”

  He said this in the same casual tone someone else might say, “I’m going to the bank and I’ll pick up dinner on my way home.”

  The thought of him in the Arena made her stomach lurch to her throat. “Fighting for Romeo will basically be agreeing to assume his debt.”

  “Yep.”

  “You can’t be in debt to the mafia! And even if they let you fight—which they may not—if the urban myths are true, people die in the Arena!”

  “Yep.”

  She practically choked on her indignation. “Say ‘yep’ one more time,” Harper muttered through clenched teeth, “and I’m going to punch you.”

  He pushed off the railing and brushed past her. “I’m not debating this with you. I’ll do what I have to do.”

  She sputtered. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Hunting.”

  She started to argue that he hadn’t felt compelled to scour the streets looking for crimes to stop in a year, but it didn’t matter.

  He was already gone.

  Now she was wishing she had punched him. At least then maybe he would’ve shown her an emotion other than rage or apathy, which is all he’d been giving her since they left Romeo’s garage.

  It was almost like he’d slammed the door on his normal feelings and become a robot when she wasn’t looking. Dark. Brooding. A little scary. Ultra-controlled. Less like her fiancé and more like…

  The shut-down, emotionally closed-off Riddick he’d been when she first met him.

  Riddick now knew what it must feel like to drown in plain sight of the shoreline.

  Harper’s life was on the line and she expected him to sit back and do nothing. As if the threat of being in debt to the supernatural mafia or dying in the Arena was supposed to scare him more than the threat of losing her.

  What she didn’t seem to understand—and really, never had— was that he’d rather die a thousand times than face even the possibility of losing her.

  He growled at a little man who blocked his path to hand him a card with some hooker’s number on it. The guy—and a few others within earshot of the savage sound—practically leapt out of his way.

  Riddick caught sight of a man wearing a tattered hoodie and sunglasses not-so-subtly following a stylishly dressed young woman—who looked to be completely shit-faced—into a parking garage.

  Even if he could overlook the fact that the guy was wearing a hooded sweatshirt in ninety-degree heat, sunglasses in the middle of the night would still be suspicious. Only vampires were cold in the desert and light-sensitive enough to need shades on the Vegas strip at night.

  He maintained a respectable distance as he trailed the woman and her hapless predator. And really, the guy couldn’t be anything but hapless. Any vampire worth his salt would’ve smelled Riddick’s presence by now in the otherwise-empty garage. The guy was either clueless, or really, really hungry. Either way, it gave Riddick an advantage.

  Not that he needed an advantage tonight. Not given his current homicidal mood.

  Riddick rounded a corner and stopped dead in his tracks.

  The vampire had the drunk woman flat on her back on the hood of a late-model Honda, pinned in place by his hand on her throat. She was clawing at his hand and kicking, but because of her drunken state, her struggles were pathetic at best. She was no match for a vampire twice her size and weight.

  Seeing a woman like this—young, beautiful, small—made Riddick think of Harper, and thinking of a fucker like this putting his hand
s on Harper set his blood to a slow, simmering boil. Without so much as a growl of warning, he charged the guy.

  The would-be attacker saw him coming and shrank back, throwing a hand up to hold him off. Riddick grabbed the guy’s wrist and squeezed without bothering to back off his strength like he usually did when he was hunting. The sounds of shattering bone and pain-filled wails were music to Riddick’s ears.

  Riddick guessed, based on his strength, that the vampire was only a few months old. It would take a long time for such a new vampire to heal wounds as severe as shattered bones.

  With his good hand, the vampire whipped a switchblade out of his pocket, flicked it open, and swung in a wide arc at Riddick’s face.

  He loosened his hold on the vampire when the knife blade glanced across his cheekbone. Irritated, Riddick swiped his sleeve over the cut. Great. Head and face wounds bled like a sonofabitch. He’d look like an unfortunate extra in a Tarantino film in a few minutes, all because of a lucky shot that probably didn’t even need stitches.

  The vampire’s nostrils flared and his pupils dilated. Huh. So maybe he was just really hungry instead of completely clueless, Riddick thought. Again, not that it really mattered.

  Sorry, mosquito. I’m not on the menu tonight.

  This time when the guy came at him—one-handed, because he was cradling his broken hand against his stomach like a sissy—Riddick dropped to the ground and swept the vamp’s leg out from under him, knocking him flat on his back. Too bad vampires didn’t breathe, because a hit like that would’ve knocked the air right out of his lungs.

  The vampire dropped his knife when he hit the ground and rolled over to make a grab for it, but Riddick swatted it neatly out his reach. Pressing a knee into the vampire’s spine with enough force that he felt the bones shift, he pulled a couple of zip ties out of his pocket and cuffed his hands.

  All in all, the whole thing was over way too quickly to even take the edge off Riddick’s mood.

  The wild beast inside him whined restlessly.

  “Go ahead and take the bitch,” the vampire said, sounding awfully defiant for a guy who had his face pressed to the ground. “She’s not worth it, anyway.”

  “Shut it,” Riddick grumbled. For emphasis, he grabbed a fistful of the vampire’s hair and slammed the guy’s forehead into the ground.

  He pulled out the vampire’s wallet and glanced at his driver’s license. “I’m only going to say this once, Gerry Justice—if indeed that is your real name. You just became a vegetarian. Go to the grocery and stock up on bottled blood, because your hunting days are over.”

  “Or what?” he sneered.

  “Or else I’ll come find you. And I will, Gerry. If I hear your name come up on the police scanner for so much as an unpaid parking ticket, I’m going to hunt you down and introduce you to the sun, piece by fucking piece. Do we understand each other?”

  The vampire’s gulp was audible. “And even if I promise not to go after another human, I’m supposed to believe you’re just going to let me walk away now?”

  “I don’t remember ever saying I’d let you walk away.”

  And with that, he grabbed the guy’s ankle and twisted savagely, neatly severing bone, tendons, muscles, and skin. He tossed the amputated leg aside carelessly.

  Sadly, it would grow back. Fucking vampires could heal just about everything.

  The vampire shrieked in pain and fury, then proceeded to puke up every drop of blood he’d ingested for the past several days, from the looks of the puddle in front of him.

  A good person might have felt sorry for the guy. Riddick felt nothing but mild irritation that he hadn’t put up a better fight—and frustration, thinking that the odds of finding someone else to beat the shit out of tonight were low.

  He pulled out his cell and called 911. “If you start…inch worming away, right now,” he dispassionately told the sobbing vampire, “you might be able to escape before the cops get here.”

  Riddick stepped over Gerry’s broken body and offered his hand to the woman who was still laid out on the hood of the car like a buffet. She jerked back as if he’d swung on her.

  He withdrew his hand, thinking about what he must look like to her, blood rolling down his face onto his shirt after mutilating a vampire before her eyes.

  She saw the wild beast.

  “What the h-h-hell are you?” she cried, cowering against the windshield.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked that question. He’d never really had an answer.

  But now, maybe—just maybe—he was exactly what he needed to be to save Harper and win in the Arena.

  And if that just happened to be a monster…well, so be it.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You shouldn’t let him run away like that, Harpy.”

  Harper frowned at him and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. “Do I look like I can body-block a hundred-eighty-pound ex-slayer?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean emotionally. He’s running scared.”

  “You want to talk about Riddick’s feelings?” She leaned forward, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin in her palm. “When did you turn into such a girl, Nancy?”

  He let his head fall back against the wall. “And you’re using humor to hide the fact that you’re scared, too.”

  “Of course I’m scared, you asshole. You shot me up with poison!”

  Romeo studied her through slitted lids. “That’s the sick part. That’s not what you’re really afraid of. Because deep down, you don’t really think you’re dying. You know you’ll find a way out of this because you always do. You’re charmed.”

  She snorted. Yeah. Sitting in a hotel bathroom with Romeo Jones, poison pumping through her veins, while her fiancé stalked the streets of Las Vegas like some kind of blood-hungry, vigilante psychopath.

  Charmed, my ass.

  “So, tell me, Dr. Phil,” she began, sarcasm dripping from her tongue like venom. “If I’m not scared of dying, what am I so scared of?”

  “Losing Riddick.”

  She kicked him in the shin, although it was a halfhearted effort at best. The day was really starting to weigh on her. “Of course I’m scared of losing Riddick! You’re asking him to take on your debt to the supernatural mafia! He could get killed trying to save your sorry ass.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You’re not scared of him dying in the Arena because you know how good he is. He’s going to win and you know it. You’re scared of losing him. Of him turning back into what he was before he met you. Of him becoming what he’s always trying so hard to keep inside.”

  She blinked. Jesus, that was insightful. Scarily accurate. Not that she’d ever tell him that. “You really have turned into a girl, haven’t you? They make you check your balls at the door when you signed into rehab?”

  He sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Make jokes. Live in denial. But we really do need to talk about the Vrykolakas. We both know Riddick will fight, and if he walks in there by himself like the idiot he looks like, they’ll kill him.”

  Her head pounded at the mere thought of trying to formulate a plan tonight. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  And what fun that would be.

  She suppressed a sigh. Who knew that eloping to Vegas would be even more dramatic than one of her family’s traditional weddings?

  Mischa set her Kindle down and glanced at the display on her ringing iPhone. She sighed. She supposed The Princess Bride would have to wait. Which was a total shame, because there were few things she loved more than a hero dressed as a pirate. But, Harper was definitely one of those things. Damn it.

  “If you’re just calling to gloat that you’re now married to a hot guy while I’m sitting at home, reading, I’m going to hang up and get back to Buttercup and Wesley,” she said in lieu of a greeting.

  “You’re reading it again?” Harper asked, incredulous. “Swear to God, you’ve read it a hundred times.”

  “Only about eighty,” she
said, somewhat defensively. “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I guess, if there’s nothing on TV. Or, if you don’t have a date, which, you totally could if you weren’t so stubborn.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Ugh. If you call me a big disappointment—in Italian—because I haven’t given you any grandchildren, you’ll sound just like my mother.”

  Harper adopted a heavy, New York-Italian accent and lowered her voice to a throaty, raspy, smoker’s growl before saying, “You aren’t getting any younger, doll. Time to shit or get off the pot.”

  If she wasn’t sitting alone in the room, she’d swear her mother had just walked in. Mischa shuddered. “I’ve asked you repeatedly not to do that. It’s eerie. How the hell do you do that so well?”

  “I started practicing after the first time I met your mom. I love that accent. Its part Linda Richman, part Sophia Loren.”

  “Why are you calling me, weirdo?”

  “I need your help.”

  She snorted. “That’s no joke.”

  “No, seriously. I need your help.”

  Mischa sat up straighter at Harper’s tone. This was Harper’s serious-shit-is-about-to-go-down tone. She hated that tone. In her experience, Harper’s serious tone could mean anything from “I just found out your mother is planning to come stay with you for an extended period of time” to “I’ve just escaped a cult compound and need a ride home.”

  Regardless, no good ever came from Harper’s serious tone.

  Mischa’s concern escalated as she listened to Harper’s story, then she fluctuated between being terrified for her friend and royally pissed off at Romeo for putting her friend’s life on the line for a stupid gambling debt.

  “I’m going to kill Romeo, that rat bastard,” she said.

  “Yeah, you’re going to have to get in line behind Riddick,” Harper said dryly.

  Frankly, Mischa was surprised Romeo hadn’t been crucified on a roulette wheel at the Bellagio by now. Riddick must be getting downright mellow in his old age.

  “What can I do?” Mischa asked.

  “Do you remember that ex-Sentry biochemist you worked with at TEV?”