by Lori Devoti
“Brett will fix you another one.” Harry jerked his head toward the bar and the waitress, who, still obviously annoyed, flitted away.
“I’ll add that to your tab.” He kept his gaze over Emilie’s head, on the bar guests finding their way to their seats. The bar had a pecking order with certain seats being “owned,” for lack of a better term, based on ranking. Occasionally a vampire or an uneducated human tried to overthrow that order. Harry was in no mood for the drama such a move would create.
“You do that.” Emilie tilted her head to the side as if joining him in his perusal. “It’s a good crowd.”
Harry refused to take her bait. “There’s a table open next to the poseurs. Go play with them.”
“For someone who has asked for a favor from me, you seem awfully unwelcoming.”
“As you noticed, the bar is busy, which means I am too.”
“Really? Too busy to save your little sacrifice?”
Harry stilled. Emilie liked to taunt, but her taunts were usually based on fact. “What do you know, Emilie?”
She smiled and glanced around as if looking for someone. “Where is that waitress? I really prefer more olives in my drink.”
“Emilie.” Harry didn’t hide the warning in his voice. The effects of the liquor were quickly disappearing.
“You are no fun, but I’ve told you so before, haven’t I?” The female vamp pouted, her lips, wet from her drink, glistening.
“Tell me what you came here to tell me.” His hand moved to the cross dangling from his wrist. It was cold and still, no pulse of danger.
Not only was the charm calm, but he’d left Lindsey alone in her apartment and set an alarm on the door. If she’d tried to leave, he would have known. The building was warded.
Emilie was playing with him. She had to be, but still a chill ran through his veins.
“Oh, I didn’t come here to tell you anything. I came here to find my new friend, Lindsey, but then I realized she wasn’t available for a chat.” The vampire took another sip of her drink.
“And why is that?” he asked.
“Oh.” She rounded her eyes over her glass. “You didn’t hear it?”
“Hear what?”
She took a sip, then lowered the glass one more time. “Why, the screams coming from her balcony. I thought surely you had.” With a smile, she held the glass by its stem and called to the waitress. “I do believe I am ready for another—”
He didn’t wait to hear the rest of her demand or to do what he ached to do—grab her by the throat and shake her like a rag doll. He shoved his way past his bouncer and the line still waiting to get into the bar and raced, two at time, up the steps to the street outside Lindsey’s balcony.
The french doors were open, but there were no screams. Unsure if that news was good or bad, he climbed onto the metal fence that surrounded the coffee shop, then leapt toward the building. As his fingers grabbed onto the balcony’s metal floor, a crash sounded from inside the apartment—something large and glass shattering.
He flipped his leg up and over the balcony’s railing until he was straddling it.
Inside the apartment, Lindsey faced him. Her face was drawn and pale, and blood flowed from a cut in her forehead. In her hand was a large sliver of glass. A man dressed in jeans and a black jacket approached her.
Harry couldn’t see the intruder’s face, but he didn’t need to. Every sense in him screamed vampire.
Chapter Seven
The broken shard of glass bit into Lindsey’s hand. She’d smashed the lamp by accident but picked up the broken pieces in desperation.
The teen advancing on her seemed undisturbed by her new weapon. If anything his gaze had intensified. His eyes were almost black now, no sign of iris in them at all.
He had to be on something.
“There’s money in my wallet.” She gestured to her purse which lay on the couch not far from where she stood.
The teen’s attention didn’t waver.
He wasn’t interested in money. He was interested in her.
Lindsey’s mouth went dry at the realization. There was nothing for her to give him to make him go away. No way out of this except to fight or run, but the door was too far away. With her hands slick with her own blood, she’d never get the door open, not before he was on her.
The phone was on the floor, the dial tone blaring like a siren, but she had no hope of reaching it either.
She could scream, if she had a voice left. But she’d already screamed her throat raw, and despite the crowd waiting below to enter Harry’s, no one had come to her aid.
The full reality of her situation hit her. She closed her eyes—only for a second, but it was a second too long.
The teen raced toward her, and before she could do more than raise the broken piece of glass in front of her, he was on her.
She lashed out anyway, felt the glass catch on his jacket, felt it fall from her now numb fingers. Her hand dropped limp at her side, and she stumbled backward, propelled by her attacker’s weight.
Then she fell, and she knew it was over, knew she had lost.
o0o
Harry rushed forward. His arm wrapped around the vampire’s neck, and he jerked backward, quick and efficient. The vamp’s neck snapped. Harry heard the pop, felt adrenaline and power surge through his own body.
Then he saw Lindsey, her face pale but her eyes wide and filled with horror.
“You killed him.” She glanced down at her hands as if the blood staining them was the vamp’s and she the cause of his death.
“Not dead, just out.” Harry dropped the vampire to the floor and held out both hands to Lindsey. She stared at him, her breaths coming fast. “Not dead.” Not that it mattered. The vampire would be. Harry wouldn’t let him heal, wouldn’t let him walk the night again.
Lindsey’s gaze shifted to the immobile form. Harry kicked him, eliciting a grunt from the vampire. “See. Alive. Trust me. You told me you would trust me.”
And he’d betrayed that trust already, a voice inside him said. But he shoved it aside and focused on Lindsey instead.
Her hands and body were shaking. Her face was pale. Uncertainty radiated from every inch of her frame.
Then slowly she lifted her hands and her eyes, and he knew he had her again. He didn’t wait to give her an opportunity to think; he pulled her into his arms. His hand on her head, he pressed her cheek against his chest. “You’re okay,” he murmured.
“He dropped from the roof,” she stuttered. She held her hands up, not touching them to his shirt.
He could smell the vampire’s blood. He wanted desperately to wash it from her skin, but he couldn’t, not yet.
He stroked her hair and murmured words of comfort against her head. Still obviously dazed, she laid her cheek against his chest. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around her wounds.
“There’s an old fire ladder. I should have had it taken down years ago. The main stairs are fire rated, and the thing was a rusty eyesore,” he murmured once the gash was covered. “The boy must have climbed up it.”
“But why?” She shuddered.
“You don’t know him?” Harry didn’t recognize the vampire either. But he knew one thing. The attack wasn’t random. There was a five-block-wide SAFE zone around Bloody Harry’s, banning vampires from feeding on humans. In the fifty years since the ban had been in place, no vampire had violated the rule. The idea that one random vampire would now, with Lindsey, was highly suspect.
“No.” Lindsey stepped back so she could look down at the vampire. His eyes were open. He stared at her, his gaze hooded. A tremor ran through her body.
Harry pulled her away and guided her toward the door. “Go to the lobby. I’ll…call the police.”
“Shouldn’t I wait here? They’ll want to talk to me.” She gestured in the air. The now stained handkerchief flapped around her hand.
“I’ll handle it.” He tucked the ends of the handkerchief back down and closed
her fingers over it, holding it in place. Then he pushed her toward the door.
For a moment, he thought she would argue more, but she simply stared down at her hand and stepped through the door. Before she could disappear down the stairs, he called after her, “The lobby. No further.”
Looking confused, she nodded.
With her gone, he stepped back into the apartment, pulled out his cell, and called Brett. Assured that the bartender would see to Lindsey, he approached the fallen vampire.
Harry placed his foot on the other male’s stomach. “I hear neck breaks are the worst, make you feel all helpless, like a moth…or make that bat…pinned to a mat.”
The vampire didn’t reply. He just held Harry’s gaze, sullen and uncaring.
“Probably even worse for you, isn’t it? This part of the building is warded. I’m guessing you knew that, though. That’s why you came through the balcony, isn’t it? Someone told you to avoid the eye?”
Again the vampire didn’t reply, but sweat beaded on his forehead. Harry bent forward. “Hurts, doesn’t it? Not so much if you are in and out fast, at least that’s what I’ve been told. But you stay here for a while, and the pain builds, like holding your hand over a match. One quick swing through the flame, you feel nothing at all, but hold it there for an hour?”
Harry put more weight on his foot. The vampire didn’t need to breathe, but in his injured state and with the ward working, every little bit of extra pain had to be amplified by a thousand.
“Who sent you?” Harry already knew the answer. There were only two vampires with enough pull to get one of their followers to defy his pact so thoroughly, and one of those wouldn’t be sending a minion to kill Lindsey. She would come herself.
Which left only one.
“The prince oversteps himself.”
Anger flashed in the vampire’s eyes, telling Harry his guess was right.
He knelt on one knee next to the vamp. “I guess this is where I let you go. Where I tell you to take a message back to your leader.” He lifted his pants leg and ran his hand over the outside of his boot.
He stroked the soft leather of his boot and stared down at the vampire. “But the thing is, when I have a message to send, I like to do it myself.”
His hand moved from his boot to the custom scabbard he kept hidden inside. His fingers touched silver, cold and reassuring.
The blade seemed to welcome him. Dhamphir. He was a dhamphir, and he’d lived at peace with the vampires too long.
They lived with hunger, but then so did he.
In one swift movement, he pulled the dagger from its scabbard and drove it into the vampire’s heart.
The vampire’s eyes widened, and his body stiffened. Then, as his cursed soul escaped his body, he collapsed.
Harry jerked the blade free and ran his thumb over the metal. It came back clean. The vampire, despite his youthful appearance, had been old, not talented or smart but old. It fit. A younger vamp would have had more trouble with the wards, but older vamps, like this one, were harder to come by, not as disposable.
That Rodrigue had sent this one told Harry the prince was serious.
Harry was too.
o0o
Standing in the building’s foyer, Lindsey stared up the steps and wrapped her arms around herself.
She’d stopped shaking. That was a good thing, and her hand and forehead both seemed to have stopped bleeding, but she couldn’t stop her mind from replaying the scene from above—the cold intent in the young man’s eyes as he’d approached her.
She’d seen desperate people before, but this boy wasn’t desperate. He was determined.
He wanted to kill her, and that was all he had wanted. The nagging feelings and fuzzy images she’d experienced earlier returned. She closed her eyes as if that would block them out. Her knees bent, and for a moment, she thought she might fall. She stumbled a step, and her foot hit a new surface—smoother, smaller tile.
Her eyes flew open, and her gaze shot to the floor. Beneath her foot was the outer bit of the mosaic that she’d walked over when first entering the building. Automatically, she stepped forward until she was standing directly over the eye.
Peace washed over her. The memories, if that was what they were, were still there, but they seemed far away, back in a place where they couldn’t harm her, not anymore. Her shoulders relaxed, and she breathed in, calm and sure.
A rap from outside startled her out of her peace. Brett stared in through the glass of the front door and motioned for her to come outside. Unsure for a second, she glanced down at the eye as if could give her some guidance, but of course, simple decoration that it was, it couldn’t.
Feeling silly, she hurried to the door to let the bartender in.
He held a plastic bag, a box of wet wipes, and a bundle of clothes out to her. “Clean up, and I’ll take you downstairs.”
She glanced around. “Here? Can’t I change there?”
He shook his head, his face the usual blank canvas she was beginning to expect from him.
“Here. I’ll wait.” Still outside the building, he pulled the door closed, then leaned against it—so anyone approaching would have to get past him.
Confused but too tired to argue, she returned to the eye and did as he said.
Cleaned, dressed, and with a bandage wrapped around her hand, she walked outside.
“Should I save this?” She held out the plastic bag with her bloodstained clothing and the used wipes.
“I’ll take it.” He grabbed the bag and immediately dropped it into a trashcan. Then he grabbed her by the arm and marched her past the now dwindling line still waiting for entrance into Harry’s.
“Those clothes—”
“Were not worth saving,” he replied, abrupt.
He was right, but they were her clothes, and to see them so casually discarded was jolting.
She, however, lacked the energy to argue, and Brett gave her little opportunity. He continued his forced march until they were inside the bar. Even then he kept moving, leading her past the cooler and into an office she knew was Harry’s.
“Harry wants you to wait here.” With that, he closed the door and left her.
She stared at the back of the solid wood door for ten seconds before the shock of what she’d been through returned. Then she slid to the floor, cradled her head in her hands, and waited.
Eventually, she would get up. Eventually, she would go out in the bar, ask for Harry, and demand to know what he’d learned from the police. But for now, she would just wait…alone and happy to be that way. She closed her eyes and wished she could go to sleep, make everything that had happened that night into nothing but a dream.
o0o
“Kept her safe, didn’t you?” Brett plunked two drinks onto a waitress’s tray.
Harry, his suit still rumpled and the sight of the now dead vampire advancing on Lindsey fresh in his mind, scowled back. “She’s fine.”
“Maybe.”
A wire coiled around Harry’s heart. He hadn’t stopped to examine Lindsey. He’d been in too big of a hurry to get her out of the apartment so he could dispose of the vampire who’d attacked her. But there had been blood—her blood.
“Where is she?” He’d told Brett to bring her to the bar, but the bartender could be headstrong and unpredictable—like all vampires.
His anxiety must have shown. Brett stared at him with out-of-patience annoyance. “She’s fine—physically. I had her clean up before bringing her down here. She’s in your office.”
Harry relaxed.
“But physically fine and emotionally fine are different.”
Harry snorted. “When did you become Freud?”
Brett slid a drink down the bar to one of the waitresses. “I’m three hundred years old. I’ve got five lifetimes of seeing and causing pain under my belt.”
Harry knew Brett’s general age, he could smell it on the vampire, but the bartender had never spoken of his life as a human or a vampire.
&n
bsp; “And you are causing her pain,” Brett added.
Harry twisted his lips. “It can’t be helped.”
Brett met his gaze. “It can, but you have other goals.”
“Hurting Lindsey isn’t a goal.” This argument was getting old, at least to Harry. Brett knew what Harry had to do and why. He’d never had an issue with it before.
He said as much to the bartender. “What’s the difference now?”
“Lindsey. I don’t like seeing innocents pulled into our hell.”
“It happens all the time.” It had happened to Harry’s father, and it had happened to Harry. Harry had been born into this world, at no fault or desire of his own.
“Doesn’t make it right.” Brett grabbed a dirty glass and dropped it into the sink. There was a clatter but no sound of breaking glass. Still, it reminded Harry of Lindsey standing in the apartment armed with nothing except a broken piece of lamp.
“The ward’s powers are pointed upward. It should have stopped the vampire from entering—even on the second floor.”
“Perhaps he had a talisman.” Brett held his gaze.
“There is only one.” And Harry had ownership of it. He had on occasion, like the night of Lindsey’s arrival, allowed Brett to use it, but he had no worries that anyone else had access to the object.
“No, the ward just wasn’t strong enough on the balcony to deter a vampire as old as this one, or as determined. We have to strengthen the ward, or add something to cut off entrance from the balcony. Maybe both.”
“You could board it up. Maybe brick up all the windows.” Brett’s tone was dry, rebellious. “Or we could shackle her in your office, fatten her up like a hog awaiting slaughter.”
Ignoring Brett’s prodding, Harry walked to the backside of the bar. Tucked underneath in a black bottle was at least a partial answer to his problem. He shoved aside the mundane containers of alcohol and pulled it out.
Brett’s gaze moved from the container to Harry’s face. “No.”
“It’s the best answer.” Harry uncorked the bottle and set it to the side to let the liquid inside breathe.
Brett’s nostrils flared. He grabbed Harry by the arm. “No.”
