Bad Boys of the Underworld Box Set

by Jacey Ward

  Kelly fought with all of her might, but her struggle was for naught. The creature’s fangs pierced her skin and sank deep into her neck. She felt her skin rip open as the blood began to gush into the creature’s hot, scaly mouth. Almost immediately, the color and vitality began to drain from her fragile body and everything around her went black…

  Chapter Two: The Girl in the Gutter…

  Detective William Hartzman reached for his cell phone on the nightstand beside his bed. He glanced at the time before answering the call. It was 5:17 a.m.

  “Hartzman here,” he answered sleepily, rubbing his eyes with his free hand.

  “Sorry to call at this hour, sir, but we need you down here at the corner of 9th and Ringwald. There’s been a murder—a pretty fucked up one, too!”

  “I’ll be right there,” Hartzman replied.

  **

  The first rays of sunlight were just beginning to peek out from beneath the horizon as Detective Hartzman stepped out of his navy blue hatchback. As a homicide detective, he never looked forward to what he was going to find when he received a call like this one, but something in the deputy’s voice had made his stomach turn. He’d been fighting an ever-growing feeling of dread ever since his phone had rung.

  “Whaddawe got?” he asked his subordinate, Deputy Allan Long, as he made his way past the bright yellow police lines and into the cluster of cruisers and blue and red flashing lights.

  “Well, sir,” the Deputy cleared his throat before continuing. “Old Tom Hendricks claims that he had come out to his recycling yard early this morning and that’s when he found her.”

  “Her?” Det. Hartzman repeated in a questioning tone, looking over at Deputy Long as he made his way toward the sheet-covered corpse lying just outside the front gate of the Hendricks Recycling Plant.

  “Yes, sir. He said her body was just lying there in front of the locked gate as if someone had thrown her out like an old piece of garbage, sir.” Long’s voice was shaky and small beads of nervous sweat had formed along the edges of his forehead.

  “Any ID on the body?” Hartzman asked. He knelt down beside the white sheet, deeply dreading what he was about to witness when he finally lifted it.

  “Uhh—no, sir. But one of the other officers recognized her immediately, sir.”

  Hartzman didn’t like the sound of that. He reached down and pulled back the sheet that was covering the body of the young woman’s corpse. What he saw made him glad that he hadn’t bothered to eat anything on his way over to the crime scene. He was certain that it would’ve come back up with a vengeance.

  **

  Detective Hartzman placed a menthol cigarette between his thin lips and pulled a red Zippo lighter out of his back pocket. Shielding it from the early morning breeze, he flicked his lighter and lit it quickly. He inhaled long and deep, allowing the menthol taste to completely fill his lungs.

  “I’ve seen some pretty fucked up shit in my eighteen years on the force, but this—this takes the goddamned cake, by far,” he stated plainly, and then passed the cigarette over to Deputy Long.

  The brown-haired deputy shook his head and took in a lengthy drag.

  Detective Hartzman placed his hand to his forehead. He couldn’t stop his mind from going to the obvious explanation for this murder. He sure as hell hoped his mind was wrong though. If the inhabitants of Lexus were behind this then it would be a huge fucking violation of the truce.

  Lexus was a community of ancient vampires who had agreed to a truce with the founders of the city of Mountain Crest over a hundred years ago. Only a select few city council members even knew of their existence, and they had agreed to keep the community a secret, allowing the vampires to live there peacefully—as long they never harmed a living human being.

  Never in the past century had any of the vampire residents ever broken the truce. The humans were able to sleep at night simply because the extremely vast majority didn’t know about the potential danger that lived up the mountain.

  “Write up the paperwork and have it on my desk before lunchtime, will ya, Deputy? I’ve got to go meet my daughter for breakfast and then I’m heading up to Lexus to question that clan leader of theirs—Vincent Veldassare, I think his name is.”

  “Yeah, what’s he, like about a thousand years old, now? I think he’s been the leader up there since my granddad was a kid,” Deputy Long joked.

  He chuckled at his own remark. Det. Hartzman shrugged off the comment. The deputy had no idea just how accurate that statement could be. Deputy Long flicked his cigarette butt onto the ground before climbing back into his vehicle and speeding off down the road.

  As he made his way over to the Mountain Crest Diner, visions of what he’d just witnessed began to play over again in his head.

  Nothing could have prepared him for what he’d seen when he’d pulled back that sheet. The naked, battered body of a young brunette was lying face up on the cool, hard ground. Her eyes were wide open and sunken, as if she’d been dead for more than a week. Her skin was wrinkled and pale and her mouth was frozen in a wide-open state of both shock and horror. Right away, Hartzman had notice the two deep puncture wounds at the base of the left side of her neck. Her body had been completely drained of its blood.

  Hartzman wondered if he was going to be able to eat anything at the diner when he finally arrived.

  **

  “Hey, dad, over here!”

  Hartzman looked up as the sound of his daughter’s voice reached his ears. She was seated at a booth near one of the windows of the diner and her right arm was in the air, swinging back and forth, commanding his attention.

  Ava Hartman was William’s lovely, intelligent, and driven 25-year-old daughter who had arrived back in Mountain Crest just last week after accepting a position as a freelance writer for the Mountain Crest Journal the largest and most prominent newspaper in the city.

  Hartzman hurried over and joined her in the mahogany-colored booth, sitting down across from her.

  His daughter’s bright smile and fiery red hair never ceased to bring a grin of pride to his face. He was very proud of her and wanted her to know it. She had left Mountain Crest more than six years ago to pursue her Master’s degree in investigative journalism, and had just rented a small two-bedroom house on the East side of the city after being offered the job she‘d gladly accepted just over a week ago. He had helped her get settled in and they’d made this breakfast date only five days ago.

  “Hello, angel!” he greeted her, forcing a half-smile.

  “Hi, dad! How’s it going?’ she inquired enthusiastically.

  She was clad in a strappy lavender sundress that dipped down into a U-shape just above her breasts and her thick, wavy red hair was pulled up into a neat bun. Shiny red locks hung down on either side of her oval-shaped face, falling just beneath her perfectly strong chin. Her eyes were a bright emerald-green color, accompanied by her high cheek bones, small, pointed nose and full, lavender gloss-covered lips.

  She reminded Hartzman so much of her mother, who had died from acute leukemia when Ava had been in her second year of college. She’d taken a semester off to mourn, but had been more determined than ever to finish, feeling that it would’ve made her deceased mother proud. Now, as he stared into his vibrant daughter’s eyes, he tried to find the words to explain everything had happened early that morning.

  Why did this shit have to happen the week after she returned? he wondered silently. What the fuck was going on in the once-quiet little city of Mountain Crest?

  **

  “Her name was Kelly Garrison,” he explained in soft, solemn voice. “She was a senior at Mountain Crest high who had just turned eighteen years old last month—a goddamned baby, for God’s sake.”

  Ava looked over at him with horror in her pretty green eyes.

  “Oh, my gosh! What kind of monster would drain all of the blood out of his victim?” Ava remarked rhetorically. To her, it sounded like something right out of a bad horror movie.

  “W
ell, they questioned the boyfriend, but they don’t believe he’s a suspect,” Hartzman explained. “He claims that they were at a drive-in movie and that he went to get a bag of popcorn, and when he came back, she was just…gone.”

  “Wow!” Ava exclaimed. “And no one saw anything?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m gonna find out,” Hatzman replied.

  He had drunk 3 cups of coffee while Ava had eaten French toast, turkey bacon, and a small fruit salad.

  At least someone has an appetite, he thought dismally.

  “I’m coming with you!” Ava said, suddenly. “This could be just the kind of story I need to catapult me to the top!”

  That was his daughter; always thinking of a way to get ahead. He couldn’t help believing that she’d come by the trait honestly though. His wife had always been a perfectionist, always dead-set on reaching her professional goals.

  Ava’s mother, Aurora Daniels-Hartzman, had been a reporter for the Channel Five news before she’d fallen ill and had eventually passed away. It never ceased to amaze him how Ava looked more and more like her with every passing day.

  He also knew that there was no arguing with Ava, no matter how much he disapproved of her accompanying him to the vampire community. Ava was not yet aware of the existence of the ages-old bloodsuckers, and he wasn’t sure that he was ready for her to know about them—at least not just yet.

  Well, regardless, he realized that he was now stuck with tag-a-long and that there was no changing her mind once she’d made it up about something—another trait she’d inherited from her late mother. Detective Hartzman raised his right hand to signal the diner waitress that he was ready for their breakfast bill.

  Chapter Three: The Mate

  Why does life have to be so goddamned complicated?” Chase Veldassare wondered as he watched his father take his place at the wooden podium in the front of the community banquet hall.

  Suddenly, the entire room broke out into a loud, fully-animated round of applause. That was when a bored, uninterested Chase Veldassare realized that the attendees of the community meeting were actually clapping for him. Oops.

  “...and I am proud to announce that my son, Chase Veldassare, will be mated with Azalea Bradenton exactly three months from today!” Vincent Veldassare announced proudly.

  Vincent was up in front of nearly every member of the Lexus vampire community with a proud smile on his pale face. He was wearing a dark-colored, faultlessly tailored designer suit and his thin, dark hair was slicked back away from his slightly rounded face. He had been looking forward to this moment for months and his eyes were beaming with happiness and pride.

  He had been the leader of the Lexus Veldassare vampire clan for the past century and was looking forward to passing his legacy on to his one and only son, Chase Veldassare. It was the tradition of the clan to mate their leader with the most eligible female vampire in the community, in order to keep their legacy alive and ensure the continuation of their kind.

  Chase, however, was nowhere near as excited as his father was. He had known his “selected mate” Azalea since they were very young. Azalea used to be one of his closest friends back when they were younger; however, over the years, Chase felt that she had changed significantly when it came to her morality.

  At one time, Azalea had been a good friend and a trustworthy person. However, her hatred and disdain toward humans had deepened tremendously over time, and she had become increasingly cold-hearted and much more self-serving as she’d grown into adulthood.

  Azalea’s family had never really taken to the truce that the Veldassares had agreed to with the mortal city council leaders. They had been happier in the olden days when their kind used to rule over humans. Mortals used to bow at their feet and some of them would even offer themselves up as sacrifices to the Vampire Elders who once ruled the lands of Romania, where mortals either served as slaves or as cattle.

  However, when Van Helsing rose to power, he and his armies of vampire-slaying brutes eventually inspired the humans to revolt, and it was during this revolution that the surviving vampires were inevitably forced to flee Romania and spread out into other areas of world—far, far away from Van Helsing and his followers.

  The descendants of the Veldassare clan arrived in Mountain Crest over a few centuries ago and agreed to a truce with the leaders of the city. They had been allowed to live, thrive and procreate in the area as long as they never harmed a living human being. Every hundred years a new clan leader would be elected and would rule the next generation of the clan.

  Unfortunately, some of the vampires still harbored deep contempt and scorn toward the human race. They upheld the truce because they knew it would ensure their survival; however, they secretly wished and even planned for the day when they could once rule over humans as gods once again.

  Katheryn, Azalea’s mother, was one of these vampires. She secretly harbored a profound resentment toward mortals. She had quietly passed this on to her daughter, promising her that one day she would lead a new revolution—one that would turn the tables and make vampires the rulers over mortals again. Azalea believed this within her heart; and that as the first lady of the next generation of vampires, she would be the inspiration for that movement.

  Chase walked with deep-centered disinterest, Azalea on his arm, up to the podium where she embraced his father, Vincent Veldassare before stepping up to the podium to publicly thank the Veldessare head.

  “I am very proud to have been chosen as the next first lady of the Veldassare Vampire Clan. I just want all of you to know that I consider it a tremendous privilege to serve each and every one of you and I will not take my position for granted. I am truly dedicated to becoming the best first lady to the love of my life; Chase Veldassare, until death do us part. The day of our mating ceremony will undoubtedly be the best day of my entire life!”

  Another loud round of applause rang out in the community center meeting room as every vampire showed their praise and support for the decision the leader of their clan had made.

  Azalea was in no way unattractive—not by far. She was tall, thin and statuesque in appearance. At nearly six feet, she was roughly the height of a supermodel human. Her deep, penetrating ocean-blue eyes were extraordinarily captivating, almost mesmerizing. Flowing black hair hung down past her slender shoulders and nearly reached the small of her back. Her lips were lush and shimmery, always gleaming with a bright red gloss. Her naturally pale skin glowed in artificial light—the only kind of light she could tolerate without feeling as if she was about to burst into flames and burn to a crisp.

  She had what the city girls would have called a “Barbie” figure, with breasts that were large and perky and a waist that was narrow and firm. Her ass practically begged to be squeezed, and her legs seemed to go on for days. She was drop-dead gorgeous and she fucking knew it.

  She often used her looks to her advantage once she’d realized how remarkably appealing she truly was, and this was a large part of the reason why Chase was no longer as close to her as he’d once been during their childhood and early teenage years. He felt that she’d become a much different person—a self-serving person he no longer wished to remain close to.

  The two of them hadn’t been very close over the past several years, but still, somehow, his mother and father had decided that she would be the most ideal mate for him to marry and carry on the legacy of the Veldassare vampire clan. Why, he would honestly never understand, and he wasn’t very happy about it. As the rest of the members of the clan began to dance and enjoy the gathering, Chase lowered his head and tried hard not to think about the fact that his parents were trying to force him to mate with someone he was not in love with—no matter how attractive she was.

  Azalea stepped down from the podium with a proud grin on her flawless face. She truly was a sight to behold in her long, form-fitting black and silver dress that showed off her unblemished D-cup cleavage, pressing her pert, large breasts together. Her four and a half inch stiletto heels flattere
d her dress with their open-toe style, showing off her legs to their best advantage - and catching every male’s gaze in the building.

  Azalea winked at her future mate while stepping down from the podium. Ever since she was a young immortal female growing up in the Lexus community, she’d had plans to wed Chase and become the next first lady of the clan. Her mother had been prepping, influencing, and molding her into what she believed was the perfect female leader of the Veldassare vampire clan—all but ensuring that the Veldassares would choose her as their son’s ideal mate. She had even told Azalea at a very young age that she was destined for greatness and that she needed to do whatever she could to ensure that she grew up to become the most suitable mate for the son of the current vampire leader. And aside from having a little fun along the way, that’s exactly what Azalea had done.

  She was just as determined as her mother was that she would be the wife of the next leader of the clan and nothing was going to stop her from doing just that.

  Chase forced a half-smile when he saw her wink at him and then turned his head away from the direction where she was heading, trying not to show his indifference. He realized that now wasn’t the time to voice his disparity about being forced to mate with a woman he was not in love with. It never seemed to be the right time according to his father; however, he made a mental note to voice his disapproval later that evening in a more private setting. Again.

  Chapter Four: An Undeniable Attraction

  It was just after noon when Detective Hartzman and his daughter Ava arrived at the residence of Vincent Veldassare and his wife, Evangeline Veldassare. Ava was fascinated by the size of the homes in the neighborhood of Lexus. Though she was not yet aware that it was a vampire community, she couldn’t help but notice all of the thick, dark curtains that covered every window of every single home in the area.

  Her father pulled up in front of a mansion sized brick house covered in light grey paint and accented with a jet-black roof. They exited the vehicle and made their way up the walkway to the large, fancy rectangular front door.