“Whoa, hold up,” I say. “Who is this chick? And what’s up with the code language?”
Veerka smirks. “Devania is the woman we need to help us fight this battle. Don’t worry—she won’t be too hard to find.”
“I don’t get it,” I say bluntly. Veerka isn’t one to talk gibberish, but right now, she isn’t making a whole lot of sense to me. I get the feeling she’s only giving me half of the information, and I’m not sure why.
For a split second, my stomach tightens, and I can’t help but wonder if Veerka’s playing both sides. Is this a setup? It doesn’t feel like it, but when it comes to Veerka, I can’t trust my gut. Unfortunately, seeing her again has messed me up. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I can feel my emotions.
I’ll need more than a drink to get rid of this.
But at the same time, I don’t want to get rid of it.
“You need to be more specific, Veerka. Who is this chick? And where do I even start looking?”
“If you want to find her, you will,” Veerka says plainly.
I cross my arms and raise both eyebrows—a look intended to say, Finish answering my question.
That sexy smirk creeps back onto her lips and I can’t help but let my gaze fall to her breasts, her hips, and her thighs.
“Devania is the leader of the underground rebellion.”
My eyes shoot back up and my jaw drops—literally. I wasn’t born yesterday. Everyone knows several underground rebellion groups are working together to take down the vampires who run the show. They’ve been around for centuries, and no one knows how it started.
“Which group?” I blurt. “San Halos?”
Veerka shakes her head. “All of them.”
My stare lingers. How does she even know this Devania woman? If she’s working with Lucius, how could she be in contact with his enemy?
I can’t hold it in. “How do you even know about these groups? You’re supposed to be against them.”
She tilts her head, her smile never fading. “I created them.”
Chapter 3
──────────
There’s so much running through my mind. I get why Veerka wants me to look for this Devania chick, but what I don’t understand is why Veerka would continue to associate with someone who runs the underground rebellion. If Lucius finds out about this, she’s a dead woman… and for good this time.
I’m also dying to know what happened to Veerka way back then. I saw it with my own eyes—the castle crumbled on her. How on Earth did Devania save her from that?
I have so many questions that I can’t decide where to start, so instead, I mumble, “Devania Arkis.”
Veerka pulls her long blond hair over one shoulder and nods. “We used to work together. I was her right hand, if you will. Well, before I left.”
“Before you met Lucius,” I say matter-of-factly.
She tugs at her hair again, which leads me to believe she still has ties to this woman.
“Precisely,” she says. “But once I met Lucius, it became clear to me…”
I watch her as she speaks, but I don’t take any of it in. Instead, her words jumble together in one long, incoherent ramble and I can’t help but smirk. “You sneaky little bitch.”
She stops talking at once and pulls her face back as if I backhanded her and insulted her entire family.
“You infiltrated the Vampire Mafia,” I say.
She doesn’t smile, but there’s a glimmer in her eye that confirms it all for me.
“How the hell did you keep this from Lucius? The man has people everywhere. Surely, someone out there knows who you are.” As the words come out of my mouth, the gravity of the situation hits me. “Have you lost your mind, Veerka? How long can you keep this going? What’s gonna happen when Lucius finds out? Not only will you have betrayed him… you’ll have taken away his love.” I slap my forehead. “Wow, you must have this vampire wrapped around your little pinky to be able to get away—”
Veerka points a stiff finger at me. “That’s why he had better not find out. If you so much as breathe a word of this, Alexis, I’m dead.”
I’m about to make a joke about her already being dead, but I can tell she’s not in the mood. And now, I understand why. This is serious. She’s a traitor to the most powerful people in all of San Halos. They’ve made an example of anyone who’s ever crossed Lucius—some were torn apart by fishhooks, one tiny piece at a time, and others dipped into buckets of acid.
As horrible as that sounds, it’s even worse for a vampire since they don’t die. Instead, they’re reduced to a skeleton held together by a few pieces of muscle and left to suffer until Lucius gets bored with them. After that, he severs their heads. Someone once told me he’s even allowed some of his victims to recover, only to repeat the same torturous cycle again and again like a cat playing with a half-eaten mouse.
He’s one sick son of a bitch, and if he finds out that the woman he loves has been deceiving him this whole time, well, I don’t even want to imagine what he’ll do to her.
“Relax,” I say. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
She’s anything but relaxed and neither am I. The rebellion is a massive group. It’s comprised of multiple groups around the world, and there are bound to be a few traitors and rats. This also means that anyone in need of something from Lucius won’t hesitate to use Veerka as blackmail.
Although I don’t voice my concerns aloud, I feel them in the pit of my stomach. Veerka’s fucked. Totally, entirely, and utterly fucked. If she tries to leave Lucius, he’ll kill her, and if he finds out the truth, he’ll kill her.
There’s one way out of this that won’t involve losing Veerka for good.
I cross my arms, which always makes me feel as tough as I am. “It’s fine. We’ll fix this, okay?”
She stares at me and bites her plush bottom lip. If she were still human and emotional, her eyes would probably start to water right about now.
I shrug as a way of making my next words come across as a piece of cake, when in reality I’m in way over my head. “We’re going to take that fucker down.”
This seems to soothe her, which is what I was going for. I can comb through the details later and figure out a master plan. She runs her hands through her hair, closes her eyes, and lets out a sharp breath. “Yeah, you’re right. We have to tough this out a bit longer until Devania and the rebellion—”
Suddenly, a blinding blue light flashes in front of us and I shield my eyes with my forearm. Despite my attempt to protect my eyes, I have to blink dozens of times to regain my sight. At first, the apparition is hazy… almost like a cloud. But the shape morphs into a giant blue ball of electricity before swirling into a large oval the size of a car. As the colorful swirls spin around the center, Las Vegas begins to look like rainbow-colored paint being mixed in a can.
I recognize that shape, and those lights: it’s magic.
Without warning, Drax comes bursting out of the portal, swinging his massive arms as if trying to swim through the air. If he weren’t my best friend, I’d have thought him to be some dragon demon with that green scaly skin of his.
As he comes tumbling toward us, Veerka and I jump to our feet—me, out of confusion, and Veerka, in preparation for a fight. She parts her crimson lips, a catlike hiss aimed at Drax. The moment he sees her, he instinctively pulls his upper lip over his giant row of incisors—a look I rarely have the pleasure of seeing.
“Guys!” I shout, and Veerka and Drax turn toward me, the aggression on their faces vanishing as fast as it appeared.
Slowly, Veerka unclenches her fists, no doubt sensing that I know him.
But before she can interrogate me on who this lizard-man is, I throw my arms over my head. “What the hell are you doing here, Drax?”
He gasps hard to catch his breath and points backward into the portal. But before he can explain anything, a thick leather book comes hurling out of the portal and hits him square in the face. His big head roc
ks back and his eyes go crossed, then the stumbling starts up again.
The book lands hard on the floor, making a smacking sound.
Shit.
The Book of Origin.
The same book I may or may not have stolen from Rachel, the inexperienced teenage witch. I promised to give it back to her if she helped me reach Veerka with her portal. She did exactly that, so Drax gave her the book about a week ago. So what the fuck is going on? Why is he stumbling out of one of Rachel’s portals with her book?
A high-pitched scream fills the air around us and out from the portal comes Rachel. I’d recognize that wiry, port-red hair anywhere, along with that little minion of hers, Riskus.
She waves a stick in the air—maybe it’s a wand—and shouts something that sounds like a mixture of Latin and Russian. Maybe it’s Witch Speak. Who knows? Beside her, Riskus does the same, only without a wand. He reaches into a leather pouch on his belt, extracts a purple powder, and throws the dust at the swirling portal.
Rachel jabs her wand into the gaping hole and shouts, “Exitrus!”
At once, the portal flickers, but right before it’s about to close, a huge red talon comes reaching through it, its massive claw catching Rachel’s shirt.
Holy mother of…
One of its claws alone is half the size of Rachel’s body. She screams as the tip of it pulls her by the shirt, dragging her backward and into the closing portal.
“Master!” Riskus shouts.
He throws himself at her leg, but he’s too small and light to be of any help at all. Instead, he gets dragged along with her, squealing and kicking his tiny childlike legs.
Drax and I bolt toward them. As I extract my wrist blades, Drax grabs Rachel around the torso, digs his feet claws into the roof’s cement, and pulls back as hard as he can as if playing a game of tug-of-war. It doesn’t do much, but it’s enough to slow everything down.
With my blade, I slice downward through Rachel’s shirt right before she disappears into the swirling hole. She falls flat on her butt, as do Riskus and Drax, and with a soft swoosh, the portal disappears, along with the monstrous talon.
Before any of them can go on about how none of this was their fault, I slap one hand on my right hip and glare down at all three of them. “What in the actual fuck?”
Veerka’s eyes narrow on me. “For Christ’s sake, Alexis, she’s only a child.”
“Only a child?” I say, mimicking her British accent. At once, I realize how petty and condescending this is, so I stop doing it. “She’s a fuckin’ witch is what she is!”
Veerka hisses, her lips curling over her upper teeth.
“Oh, right,” I say. “I forgot how witches and vampires are taught to hate each other.”
Rachel crosses her arms over her chest and stares back at Veerka like she’s trying to challenge her. I don’t get what her deal is. It’s not like she knows anything about vampires, so she has no reason to hate them. But I suppose Veerka’s aggressive stance is enough to put Rachel on guard.
“Would you two relax?” I say. “We’re all on the same page. And speaking of pages, what the fuck, Rachel? What’re you doing here, and why’s your stupid book at my feet?”
“It isn’t stupid,” she says, her voice full of her typical teenage attitude. She reaches down, scoops up her book with both arms, and scowls at me.
My gaze shifts over to Drax, who raises his hands to either side of his face as if to say, I didn’t do anything.
“Would someone please tell me what the hell’s going on?” I snap.
Rachel points a finger at Drax. “It’s his fault!”
Drax crosses his arms and scowls like a five-year-old.
“Drax?” I say, trying hard to keep calm.
He throws a hand toward Rachel. “One of the pages fell out of the book in your apartment. It must have come out when I pulled it out of your closet last week. So she”—he narrows his eyes with even more intensity at Rachel—“decides to come looking for it with no warning. I was in the middle of watching Breaking Bad, high out of my mind, when she appeared in front of the fucking television. Scared the shit out of me.”
I turn to Rachel. “You portaled into my apartment uninvited?”
She shrugs. “It’s an important page. I couldn’t find it anywhere in my room, so I figured maybe it fell out at your place.”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I sigh and turn back to Drax.
“Anyways, I found it,” he continues. “The paper was blank and old-looking, so I don’t get what she was freaking out about.”
“It wasn’t blank,” Rachel says coldly. “It was a protection spell.”
“No, it was bl—”
“Maybe to you, because you’re a freaking lizard demon who can’t read magic!”
“Guys!” I shout.
“Someone started knocking hard on your door,” Drax continues. “I mean, it sounded like your landlord at first. You know how he gets. But then it got pretty bad and the door started shaking. So, Rachel here panicked and started reading off the sheet of paper in her hands. I thought she was making shit up, but I guess not.” He wipes a line of sweat from his scaly forehead. “It all happened so fast. This pack of four vampire dudes broke down your door—”
“My door!” I snap.
“Alexis,” Veerka says, and I realize I’m being a bit ridiculous given the fact that the three of them almost died.
“Yeah, they broke it down,” Drax says. “They were vampires, Alex. Since when do vampires want anything to do with you?”
“Fucking Jamieson,” I say under my breath.
“What?” Drax asks.
“Nothing, keep going.”
“So, when they burst in, Rachel here finished reading her spell or whatever, and this huge fucking griffin with red feet and a red beak appeared in your apartment! It was so fucking big, Alex. It could barely move around.”
“I panicked,” Rachel chimes in.
“You panicked?” I repeat.
“I created a portal with the bit of powder I had left from last time, and, well, it took us to you.”
Stretching my neck sideways, I feel a soothing snap. “Great. This is fucking awesome.”
Drax and Rachel exchange a look.
Why are they looking at each other like that? What the hell else is going on that I don’t know about?
“Come on, spit it out!” I say.
“There’s something else,” Rachel says.
No shit.
I clench my jaw.
“When the griffin started freaking out inside your apartment, it snapped its beak at me and knocked my book out of my hands.”
What is she talking about? She’s holding the book against her chest, so what could be the problem?
Then, pulling it away from her chest, she opens it up. Inside, it looks like half the pages are missing.
“The tip of its beak sliced right through it and a bunch of papers went flying out before I grabbed it again.”
Admittedly, I’m freaking out inside and about ready to fly down to the Las Vegas strip and get wasted. I can’t deal with this shit.
“Are you telling me,” I say through gritted teeth, “that the vampires who were looking for me now have half of the Book of Origin in their possession? A book which, let me remind you in case that thick skull of yours forgot, is the most powerful book known to shadow dwellers?”
With tight lips, she nods fast like a kid caught doing something wrong.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
Lethal Blow
Coming March 10, 2021
Pre-order your copy now
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Mortal Blow: An Urban Fantasy Series (Succubus Hitwoman Book 1) Page 19
