Vampire Bound: Book One

by R. A. Steffan

  “Yes. So it appears,” Rans drawled, before I could frame a reply. “Those men had some very interesting tattoos. Do you often do business with the Russian mob, Richard?”

  My ex flushed scarlet. “Look, I made a mistake, all right? And now I’m trying to fix it. I still don’t claim to understand what’s going on with that weird blond guy and the hypnotism... thing. But leaving him aside, Ivan threatened to come back and kill Vonnie and Jace if I didn’t pay up. We’ve got to get them somewhere safe.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I retorted, thinking of Teague... thinking of the way he’d threatened Leonides and the club. “But, yes. Jace should go someplace where he’ll be out of this mess.”

  “Your parents live here in St. Louis, right?” Zorah asked.

  “In North County,” I confirmed. “So that’s no good—it wouldn’t be hard to track them down. Richard’s mom retired to New Mexico, though. She’d take Jace for a while, I’m sure.”

  “Where in New Mexico?” Leonides asked.

  “Truth or Consequences,” Richard muttered.

  Zorah frowned, like she thought he was giving them attitude. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the name of a town,” Leonides explained, before I could. “A little hot springs resort on the Rio Grande.”

  She shot him a skeptical look. “Seriously? Bit long to write on an envelope, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “There was a game show on the radio called Truth or Consequences that got popular during the war. We used to listen to it sometimes when we were stationed shore-side. I guess the producers ran a contest in the late forties—the first town in the US to officially rename themselves after the show would get a big annual celebration with a parade, and they’d broadcast the radio program from there. I used to drive down for the annual gala sometimes. Pretty sure they still have it, actually.”

  “They do,” Richard said blankly, while I absorbed the idea that the war in question was World War II, and my handsome, late-thirties-maybe-early-forties boss was reminiscing about something that happened seventy-plus years ago.

  “Anyway, it’s just a little postage stamp of a place in the middle of the desert,” Leonides continued. “Not a bad spot to lie low.”

  I scrubbed at my face, the late hour and the night’s traumatic events finally starting to catch up to me. “Okay. That’s the plan, then. We’ll have to scrape together enough money for a plane ticket. So, I... uh, might need a paycheck advance, boss.” Which is super awkward, since the club where I work has been closed down indefinitely.

  But Leonides waved me off. “I’ll take care of it. He’ll need an unaccompanied minor service, since I doubt there’s a direct flight out of Lambert. Also, I’d feel better putting him in business or first class rather than economy. Richard—does your mother have a preference between El Paso International or Albuquerque International?”

  “El Paso’s closer,” Richard said, looking like he wasn’t quite sure how we’d gone from vague discussions of Jace staying with relatives to my boss booking first class tickets across the country for our son.

  Leonides nodded and snapped his fingers. “Len. Laptop.”

  Len had been propping up a wall, keeping his own counsel during the discussion. At that, he pushed upright—snapping off a short, ironic salute. “Whatever you say, boss. Just as long as you stay the hell away from my browser history. Red? Your phone’s on the counter. Pretty sure it’s still got some charge left.”

  I nodded my thanks, trying on a small smile for him. Suddenly, the idea of levering myself upright to go retrieve it felt overwhelming. Something of that must have showed in my posture, because Leonides disappeared into the kitchen and returned with the pink phone case in hand. For the second time in our acquaintance, I accepted it from him as he handed it back to me. Len was right—it still had a twenty-two percent charge. I powered it off so it wouldn’t burn through too much of the remaining battery life before I needed it.

  “Call his grandmother as soon as you think she might be up in the morning,” Leonides said. “I’ll get a list of tomorrow’s flight times for you.”

  “And in the meantime,” Zorah added, “go get some rest, Von. You look like you’ve been kidnapped by the Russian mafia and spent the rest of the night in a house full of vampires.”

  “Imagine that,” I said, and found the strength to drag myself off the couch after all. I probably should have mustered the verbal skills necessary to properly thank my boss and his friends for rescuing me from the disaster that was my life. But all I could focus on was the idea of crawling onto the bed where my son was resting—miraculously safe after the night’s events—and staring at him until I fell asleep.

  “Vonnie.” Richard moved to intercept me, but I knocked his hand aside when he reached for me.

  “Don’t,” I said, my voice a growl as I shoved past him.

  The house was small, and it didn’t take long to find the closed bedroom door and creep inside. Jace was sleeping with the bedside lamp turned on, to hold the monsters at bay... like he’d used to do when he was small. The sight broke my heart.

  I was still barefoot, my soles scraped and bruised from the grit of the parking lot. Blood had stiffened the ripped fabric around the knees of my yoga pants. Tonight I’d been kidnapped, shot, magically healed by an undead supernatural creature... and then I’d capped off the evening by telekinetically blowing a locked door off its hinges.

  My life was off the rails... but my son was safe, at least for now. A house full of vampires stood between Jace and anyone who might try to cause him harm.

  I settled gingerly on one side of the double bed. Jace stirred, murmuring restlessly.

  “It’s just me, baby,” I told him. He quieted, asleep once more, and I stretched out on top of the covers, watching him in the yellow circle of light cast by the lamp. My eyelids grew heavier by degrees, until they eventually slipped closed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I JERKED AWAKE some time later from a nightmare of being shot. As the dregs of the dream faded, leaving me shaky and beaded with clammy sweat, I became aware of the sound of people arguing in hushed voices elsewhere in the house. The sun was still low, lending the light an early-morning quality through the open curtains framing the window.

  “Mom?” Jace murmured, his voice groggy—still mostly unaware of his surroundings.

  I ran my fingers through his messy black hair, for my own reassurance as much as his. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”

  My son had always been a champion sleeper, and I was grateful for that now as he closed his eyes and quickly dozed off again. I eased out of the unfamiliar bed, trying not to intrude any further on Len’s privacy by looking too closely at his personal stuff. I got a jumbled impression of a handful of framed photos and a surprising number of books before I closed the door behind me and searched out the bathroom.

  When I arrived in the kitchen where several of the others were congregated, it was to find the heavenly smell of coffee percolating. I gravitated to the coffeemaker as though drawn by a magnet, the voices around me fading to a meaningless buzz beneath the siren call of caffeine. Since pulling the coffee pot out of the machine and pouring the entire thing directly down my throat would have been rude, I dragged my eyes away to search for mugs.

  “Bottom shelf, left-hand cabinet,” Len said helpfully.

  I gave him a grateful nod. With his blue ombre fauxhawk un-teased and falling over his forehead, he looked younger, somehow. The first mug that came to hand had the words ‘Coffee makes me feel less murdery’ emblazoned on the side, which seemed somehow prophetic since Richard was in the room.

  Hoping to test the hypothesis, I filled it and drank, ignoring the liquid’s scalding temperature. Nope... truth in advertising was apparently dead. I was still feeling decidedly murdery as the first caffeinated jolt hit.

  Ah, well.

  “Right. What are we arguing about?” I asked, performing a quick headcount. “Because I need to call
Malinda soon, and I should probably get the yelling out of my system first.”

  “I can call her. She’s my mother, you know,” Richard muttered, and, oh yeah—the coffee mug had definitely lied to me.

  It was crass to air our dirty laundry in front of other people. I knew that. Really, I did. Of course, I might have cared more about that fact if I hadn’t been shot twice last night.

  “Yes, Richard,” I said icily, “She’s your mother, and unless something’s changed, you still owe her twenty-five thousand dollars from the last get-rich-quick scheme you needed funded.”

  “Ouch,” Zorah offered from her perch on a stool next to the breakfast bar. “And to answer your question, Vonnie, we’re fighting about the fact that all three of you need to hunker down somewhere safe. Even if you hand over the money to your Russian mob guy tomorrow, he’s still going to assume you had something to do with his goons disappearing. And that’s before we get to the part where the Fae have been poking around.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Richard said through gritted teeth. “I have to make sure nothing happens to the shop. It’s all I’ve got now, damn it.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I shot back. “Because if Ivan sends someone to burn it to the ground, you’re going to heroically fight them off like you heroically fought off the guys last night.”

  “I own a gun, Vonnie! I just didn’t have it with me!”

  Jesus Christ. My ex was going to end up dead, wasn’t he? I spoke through gritted teeth. “Yes, good plan. Terrific. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”

  “That shop is my life!” Richard said. “What the hell else do I have left?”

  I set the coffee mug down harder than necessary and rounded on him, getting in his face in a way I’d never done before in the sixteen years I’d known him. “You have a son, Richard! Do you want him to grow up without a father?”

  Richard stepped back as though he’d been physically struck. A second later, an uncertain voice came from the hallway. “Mom? Dad? What’s going on? What are you fighting about now?”

  I closed my eyes. It was official—I was, in fact, the worst mother on the planet. I also couldn’t protect my child from the truth anymore. Not all of it.

  “Shit,” Richard whispered, barely audible.

  The others in the room were silent, and I couldn’t blame them one bit. If I were them, I wouldn’t want to wade into this bad soap opera, either.

  “Jace,” I said, “you’re going to go stay with Grandma Sheng in New Mexico for a while. It’s the safest thing after what happened last night.”

  He looked alarmed. “What? No! And what did happen last night? You said we owed some people money—and you knew it wasn’t just a burglary when those people showed up and started trying to break in!”

  I took a deep breath, reaching for calm. “You’re right. It was the men wanting their money. And until we get it sorted out, I don’t want you anywhere near this.”

  His dark eyes—so like his father’s—took in my torn clothing and the various stains covering it. When he met my gaze again, his expression was anguished. “Did they... beat you up last night?”

  “No, baby,” I told him, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t technically a lie. “Look at us—we’re fine. Just a bit shaken up, that’s all.”

  “But—” Jace began.

  “Jace,” Richard cut in. “You’re going to your grandmother’s. That’s final.”

  “But what about you?” Jace blurted, ignoring the ultimatum. “You can’t stay here—you have to come, too!”

  I sighed inwardly, resigned to the fact that my previous argument with Richard was doomed to end in a messy draw, at best. “No, Jace. We have to stay here and get the situation sorted out,” I said. “It’d be hard to do that from New Mexico.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Jace said, stubbornness firming his jaw. “Not unless you come with me.”

  Leonides glanced up from the laptop he’d been doggedly typing away at the whole time. “Look at me, kid. Yes you do.”

  It took a minute for what he’d just done to click in my mind. When Jace opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before saying, “Oh. Yeah, okay,” in an absent tone, I turned to my boss in astonishment.

  “Did you seriously just mesmerize my son?” I demanded.

  He raised an eyebrow. “You have an objection under the circumstances?”

  It was my turn to do the gaping fish routine as I tried and failed to marshal an argument against an outcome I’d been trying to achieve mere moments ago.

  “Next time, ask first,” I managed. “Better yet, let’s avoid the need for a ‘next time.’”

  Richard, meanwhile, was giving Leonides a look of combined fear and disbelief. I gathered he still hadn’t truly internalized the whole ‘vampires are real’ thing, even after Zorah’s little display earlier. Which... wasn’t really a shock. To be fair to him, it was a bit hard to take in. I had vague memories of getting drunk off my ass the night I’d learned about the supernatural world, so I couldn’t really claim the high ground on that one.

  “When do I leave?” Jace asked. “Can we go back to the apartment first? I need to pack.”

  A frisson shivered across my skin, because the sudden change in his demeanor was genuinely creepy.

  Zorah hopped off her stool. “Rans went back there last night to watch the place for you, so it should be fine. Vonnie, why don’t you call Grandma and get the flight times coordinated with her? Then we can all go together.”

  But Richard was shaking his head, still looking back and forth between Leonides and Jace. “Naw, man. This is crazy. I’m out of here. Vonnie, you make sure our kid’s safe, you hear me? I don’t know what kind of insane crap you’re mixed up in with these... people, but it’s worse than anything I did to get a loan. You should go to New Mexico with Jace, and stay there. Get yourself away from all of this—because it’s fuckin’ nuts.”

  Zorah blinked. “Geez... you seriously slept with this guy, Vonnie?”

  I wanted to say, ‘I was fifteen at the time, cut me some slack,’ but impotent rage had choked me at the sheer gall of Richard’s words. I turned to Leonides, struggling to keep my voice calm. “Okay, change of plans about the mesmerism. Because I need my son not to hear what’s about to go down.”

  He raised his eyebrows for a moment before smoothing his expression and turning back to Jace. “You still look tired, kid. Go back to Len’s room and grab another hour of sleep. Nothing will disturb you.”

  Jace frowned absently. “’M just gonna go nap for a bit, Mom.”

  “You do that, sweetheart,” I said in a monotone.

  Richard looked like he was about to burst something. “Vonnie! How can you let this guy—”

  I cut him off. “This guy helped save my life,” I hissed. “This guy gave me a job so I didn’t have to sell sex for money to pay off your fucking debts, Richard!”

  “Oooh, here we go,” Zorah said, settling in.

  “There’s popcorn in the box by the microwave,” Len muttered.

  Leonides went back to whatever he’d been typing on the laptop earlier, ignoring the rest of us with single-minded determination. At the other end of the house, I heard the bedroom door creak on its hinges as it closed.

  “They’re fucking vampires!” Richard half-shouted.

  Len raised a hand. “Well, to be clear—I’m not.”

  “You’ve been sucking me dry for fifteen years!” I shouted back. “Emotionally, financially... so what does that make you?”

  Richard’s face turned red. “I’m trying to get ahead! You have to be willing to take risks if you want to make it big!” A soft snort came from the direction of the rickety folding table where Leonides was working, but Richard either didn’t hear it or chose to ignore it. “I’m trying to start a business and make money for this family!”

  My blood pressure felt like it was about to erupt out of the top of my skull like Mount Vesuvius—doubly impressive considering how much my bullet wounds had
bled a few hours ago.

  “We. Are. Not. A. Family,” I ground out. “We’re two idiots who slept together once and accidentally made a kid. If it wasn’t for Jace, I’d tell you to crawl back to Ivan without his money, and good riddance.”

  The words burned like acid on their way out. In that moment, I meant them, and I didn’t know what kind of person that made me.

  Richard’s expression went cold. “I’m leaving. And I swear, Vonnie... if you let anything happen to Jace—”

  My hands trembled with rage, clenched into fists at my sides. “Finish that sentence, Richard. I dare you.”

  He opened his mouth, only to close it and shake his head angrily. Without another word, he pushed past me and headed for the broken front door. He had to wrestle with it to make a gap wide enough that he could slip out. Making no attempt to close it again, he headed down the driveway and turned toward the cul-de-sac’s entrance, presumably to find the nearest bus stop.

  “And the sex wasn’t even good!” I yelled after him, knowing how petty it was, and not caring. I wished desperately that the door was in any condition to slam.

  Since it wasn’t, I yanked and shoved it back into its roughly closed position—mostly to hide the fact that I was still shaking with reaction. Gradually, I became aware of the silence inside the house, broken only by the tapping of a keyboard.

  I turned around slowly.

  Zorah raised a questioning eyebrow at me. “Feel better now? Because I kind of do.”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “Remind me not to piss you off,” Len said. He ran his hand through his ruined fauxhawk, sweeping it off his forehead. “So, um... if you don’t need me for anything, I’m gonna run to Lowes with the pimpmobile and pick up materials for the front door.”

  “Good idea,” Zorah said. “Rans said he’d do the actual fixing, though.”

  “Just as well,” Len muttered. “I’m better with cars than carpentry.”

  He headed toward the bathroom, presumably to freshen up and apply enough product to his hair to be seen in public. I flopped onto one of the kitchen stools and buried my face in my hands, thoroughly exhausted even though I’d been awake less than an hour.