by Anna Abner
He was a piece of shit. A no-good, selfish, cowardly pile of garbage.
He could do one decent thing, though. He could get Violet away from the horde.
That firecracker must still be alive. She was stronger than anyone gave her credit for. No one had been able to cow her—not Olek, not him, not even Sergei.
“I will find Violet,” he vowed, and his chest swelled slightly with the first stirrings of hope. He could do this. For her. For himself. He could do something noble and selfless. He would.
Connor speared him with a look. “I don’t know who that is, but you’ll have to get your strength back to find anyone. In the condition you’re in right now, you’d fall over at the first stiff wind. You’re useless.”
“Your flattery is embarrassing me.”
He rolled his eyes. “Just telling the truth, brother.”
“I’ll help you,” Ali chimed in, and then ducked her head, shielding her face with her long blonde hair.
“Thank you.”
“Anyway,” Connor said. “The Oracle didn’t make a lot of sense.” The man’s hands tightened on the steering wheel of his obnoxiously loud F-350 pickup. “But the gist is to be at a specific corner at a specific time. Oh, and by the way,” he said sarcastically, “bring Maksim Maks with you. It’ll be fun.”
“Hmm.” Maks couldn’t care less about the ramblings of an unstable young woman. Olek, though, had been obsessed with the Oracle Ilvane’s prophecies, especially the ones about him. The Anya from Nadvirna prophecy had pestered him more than the rest, but that had been proven true. Anya, now Ali, had destroyed him and fulfilled her prophecy.
“Whatever happens, I trust her,” Connor said. “If she says you should be there, you should be there.”
“Anya, do you believe in this prophet?” he asked, edging around to see her more fully. She looked so much like her mother. The only thing she’d gotten from her father was his yellow hair. Everything else came from Katya, his little bird. She would be so proud to see her daughter grown and doing well. The thought of Katya’s dismembered skeleton buried in the Nevada sand made his stomach clench. The damned US Army had tortured and killed her, then buried her in a mass grave. As if she was nothing, as if they possessed the right.
“It’s Ali,” she corrected him, “and yes. I trust her.”
Guilt again. Sour, acidic regret.
Perhaps the way to Ali’s good side was through Katya. “Do you want to know anything about your mother?” Maks blurted out.
“What?” She looked startled and maybe a little hurt.
Where had his legendary charm gone? Had it finally been beaten and humiliated out of him? Had Sergei done what neither Olek nor the US Army could? Break him?
“Your mother,” he tried again, more slowly. “I can tell you stories about Katya. If you’d like to hear them.”
Connor broke into their conversation before Ali had a chance to answer. “Sorry guys, but we’re here, and we’re cutting it close on time. Rain check on the family reunion?”
#
Violet Russell blinked into the gauzy light, unable to make out more than varying shadows within a poorly maintained bathroom in a tiny hotel room stinking of mold and cigarette smoke.
She’d once naively believed being the blood slave of Oleksander the Destroyer had been the worst experience of her life. When he’d given her to his second-in-command, Maksim Volk, it had been a relief. Maks didn’t beat or abuse her and only drank from her when necessary. He didn’t release her, either, but he didn’t harm her.
What a fool she’d been to think things couldn’t get worse than Olek. Being a captive of Sergei and the Four Sons’ horde was worse.
If Maks hadn’t split, they might have figured out a plan together. But the beautiful dummy had abandoned her. After all the blood she’d sacrificed for him, he’d just left.
Life wasn’t working out as she’d planned. Things had started out okay. Two parents, a decent home, twin little brothers, a mediocre elementary school, and church on Sundays. But things had gone seriously awry. She’d downgraded from girl next door to blood slave.
She didn’t deserve it.
A stupid bachelorette weekend in Vegas with her cousin Lexi, the bride-to-be, had decimated her entire life and all of her potential. If Violet had been at home with her baby Jackson on the night Olek had been netting blood donors, she wouldn’t have been pushed into a dark corner by a giant of a vampire, drained into submission, and driven to an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of town. She wouldn’t have been kept like a farm animal for weeks and handed over to Maksim Volk like a half-eaten sandwich.
Maks had the pretty face and lanky body of a seventeen-year-old boy just coming into his own. He wasn’t a boy, though. He was much older than he looked. And he cried quietly in his sleep. When asleep, the most Olek had ever done was snore and fart. But Maks was different. Something inside him was broken, and in the dead of night when she was the only witness, tears came. In those moments, it was easy to forget he was a vampire. And not just any vampire—Maksim Volk, right hand man to Oleksander the Destroyer. Maks the Traitor. The Beautiful Devil.
He may appear a cold-blooded killer, but he wasn’t. He was a broken man trying to survive among monsters.
She worried about him, and worrying about Maksim Volk made her question her own sanity. He stayed out late, returned stumbling and covered in blood. And he rarely drank from her, which made her wonder both where else he acquired his blood and why she wanted him to taste her. But he was just the right kind of crazy to make her want to know more.
For the past thirty-six hours, Maks and Sergei had both been no-shows in her shitty new slave quarters, and Violet existed in a strange dream world of exhaustion, anxiety, and gnawing hunger. Once in a while, one of her captors would remember that she required sustenance, too, and they’d give her a can of soda or a granola bar. It wasn’t enough to keep her alive for long, not with the prolonged anemia.
If Maks planned to rescue her, he’d better move faster.
She might save him the effort.
The door opened, and painful fluorescent light poured into the foul-smelling room. Sergei himself glared down at her. He opened a single can of salty, processed soup and toed it across the tile. They made eye contact, and Violet read nothing but cruelty in his dark stare.
Then Sergei was gone.
Violet hesitated only a moment, straining to hear the vampires as she stood on weak legs and tip toed oh-so-slowly through the deserted hotel room. She pictured her son’s bright, pink face, all curious golden eyes and sloppy smiles. He needed her. Violet must be brave.
Light as a feather, quiet as a butterfly, she scampered to the window and peered down onto a busy street. It was a three-story drop, but she hardly registered as she slid open the glass and tore through the screen.
Where no one had been a moment ago, Sergei stood in her personal space. He caught her by the hair with a laugh of amusement. Violet stiffened, fighting the urge to scream her throat raw. Though she wanted to wail and beat her fists against the vampire warlord, she swallowed the pain.
“I grow bored of you.” Sergei sniffed her flesh from her mouth to her throat. “I look forward to seeing the traitor’s face when I tell him I made you fly.”
#
Maks hopped out of the truck, berating himself for screwing things up with Ali yet again. Maybe after a good night’s sleep and a hot shower he’d be a little better at talking to her, not that he’d ever had that problem before.
“This is the spot,” Connor said, marching across the sidewalk in front of a sleazy hotel from the nineteen sixties. He checked his watch. “Two minutes to spare. Keep your eyes peeled. Anything seems out of the ordinary, speak up.”
Maks wandered a little down Thompson Street, finding few crowds this early in the afternoon. He backtracked and stared down Faraday. Nothing supernatural about a parking lot and a weed-choked chain link fence. The most unusual things on either street were the three of them standin
g around looking conspicuous as hell. Maks joined Connor on the corner and gazed up at the dilapidated hotel that could stand in for a set from a Hitchcock film.
As he watched, movement in the third-floor window caught his eye. Wood casing splintered, and a girl sailed through the window, tumbling straight for the sidewalk at their feet.
Not any girl. Violet.
It took Maks no more than a split second to recognize the rags Violet wore and her streaming auburn hair as she plummeted to earth.
Beside him, Connor had seen her too and steadied himself to catch her. Maks shoved him off balance, stepped into his spot, and looked up just as Violet crashed into him with the force of a falling piano. She flattened him to the pavement, but he was able to hold her off the ground and sit up as Violet hung limply from his arms.
“Oh, my God!” Connor exclaimed. “Did you see that? She fell out of a window, and you fucking caught her! You caught her.”
Maks cradled Violet to his chest and patted her pale cheek. Bruises along her throat told him she’d been bitten. A lot. The actual fang marks may have healed, but the bruises were a different matter. They’d be around for a few days.
“Violet?” he whispered. The shock of the fall and the force of their collision had knocked her out. “Ali?” he tried instead. “She needs a doctor.”
“Of course, of course,” she said, her cell phone already plastered to her ear. “Lukas will be here in two minutes.”
“Who’s Lukas?” Maks queried. Violet was nothing but skin and bones in his arms, and he wasn’t handing her over to just anybody, not again.
“A friend.”
Connor grabbed Maks by the collar and shook him back to the present. “Hey, hero, the jerks who threw your friend out of a window are taunting us. Feel like kicking their asses?”
Maks tore his gaze from Violet’s pallid face to Connor’s and then further up the wall of the shady hotel. Sergei leered out the shattered, third-floor window. For a brief moment, their eyes met, and Maks had never known such rage.
Sergei blew him a kiss.
“Ali, promise me you’ll take care of her.”
“Of course,” she stuttered. “I mean, I promise.”
Without removing his eyes from his enemy, Maks passed Violet into Ali’s lap. As he dashed for the hotel lobby, he heard Connor’s heavy footfalls behind him, though he didn’t wait to see if the man followed. Maks didn’t care. He was angry enough to take on an army single-handedly.
Maks ran up two flights of stairs in a dead sprint, and then he crashed through the door to the first room on the left. Right into a knife.
The blade punched through his abdomen. He roared, grabbing the vampire by the hair and torqueing his head so hard he nearly decapitated the unlucky henchman. The man collapsed into a boneless heap.
Connor blew past him headed straight for Sergei as Maks ignored the eight-inch blade bisecting his liver. His rage outshone any other sensation, even pain. Grabbing a pot-bellied lamp off the end table, he threw it overhand at Sergei’s head. It struck with a reassuring crunching sound.
Sergei just brushed off the attack as he and Connor exchanged heavy blows in super speed, catching and throwing punches evenly until Sergei feinted left, forced Connor face first into the wall, and rabbit punched him between the shoulder blades. Connor sucked in a horrified gasp as his legs gave out. Before Maks could reach them, Sergei grabbed Connor by an arm and a leg and tossed him out the window.
Though his pulse roared through his ears, Maks slowed his approach. He’d been spanked by Sergei before.
In the Ukraine, back when Oleksander was keeping his monster of a little brother reined in, Sergei hadn’t dared touch a hair upon Maks’ head. With Olek dead, Sergei seemed to be making up for lost time.
“You didn’t have to hurt her,” Maks shouted, his voice ragged with fury. “You didn’t have to use her like a piece of meat, not when you knew how much she meant to me.”
“I hoped you were already dead,” Sergei growled. “I’m delighted to correct my mistake.”
Maks didn’t care whether he lived or died. Violet was safe. Ali was grown and well. Katya was beyond him. He could die and be satisfied with his life.
He grabbed the TV remote off the coffee table and flung it as hard and as fast as he could at the other man’s head. While Sergei was distracted, Maks slid the knife from his belly and lunged, driving his shoulder into Sergei’s midsection and then peppering his abdomen with the blade. In and out, a staccato rhythm, hoping to sever an artery or twenty.
Sergei rained down a skull-cracking blow to the back of Maks’ head, stunning him. Dazed, he dropped his arms, leaving the knife embedded in Sergei’s belly. Easily as lifting a kitten from a curtain, Sergei took hold of Maks’ throat and carried him to the window. Dangling three stories above the concrete, Maks struggled to find any purchase on the walls or casing to keep from falling.
Unable to hoist himself back inside, Maks wrenched the knife from the warlord’s belly. Sergei squeezed his hand around Maks’ throat. Vertebrae crackled and his left leg went numb. Before he lost all control—and maybe his head in the process—Maks gripped a piece of stone siding with one hand and sawed at Sergei’s wrist with the other. The vampire continued squeezing, harder and harder. Maks cut faster.
Finally, Maks broke through bone, and he was weightless for a split second. The force of gravity was too much for his fingertips to fight, and Maks fell.
It was only a three-story fall. He’d leapt off much higher buildings than—
Chapter Two
Ali stared at the love of her life—now a bleeding, crumpled mess—and came close to losing it. Connor, broken and still, bled all over both the sidewalk and Maks beside him.
She was going to glow.
If she did, it would be in front of a crowd of drunken tourists and looky-loos because the fall of a trio of young people—the female ragamuffin, then Connor, and finally Maks—in quick succession had definitely caught the attention of everyone within sight. Twenty-somethings and middle-aged couples crowded the sidewalks, so many Ali couldn’t differentiate one face from another.
If Lukas hadn’t absconded with the female victim moments earlier, Ali would be calling him back for help.
Ali tried to focus. Connor needed her. So did Maks. She couldn’t let them be photographed or tested. If the government discovered two helpless vampires, they could both be imprisoned and experimented on indefinitely.
“Back up,” she pleaded to the gathering crowd. “Give them room to breathe.”
People edged away exactly half a step. Phones emerged.
“Stop filming,” she exclaimed, her anger roaring up and obliterating any fear. “Do you have no decency at all?”
She felt it then, the tingle in her extremities. Her power surged, but she couldn’t let it escape. It was one thing for dumb kids to film the two remaining victims on the sidewalk out of some sick, macabre curiosity. It was quite another for them to capture her abnormality—live and in high def.
“You’re the monsters,” she accused, disgust dripping from her lips. “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Then, fists and jaws clenched, she knelt beside a facedown Connor. His legs were obviously broken. They’d deal with that. As long as they were set properly, and quickly, they’d heal good as new. She couldn’t see his face, but there had to be fractures there too.
Connor’s heart was beating, and he was breathing. Knowing it was enough to keep him alive, she scooted over to Maks and checked his pulse. Face up, blood drained from the back of his head, and fresh bruises darkened his throat. But then, she’d seen him held out the window by the neck. Other than his head wound, he appeared intact.
Then her eye caught the bloody, severed hand tucked between Maks’ forearm and his waist. Thinking to protect him and hide any evidence of the supernatural, she slid it into her shoulder bag.
Sirens screamed somewhere behind her. Time was running out. But she couldn’t move either of the
men into the pickup, not by herself, not even Maks, the smallest of the two. She called Roz.
“We have a serious problem,” she gasped into the phone.
“I know,” Roz replied, not understanding at all. “I’m on my way to speak healing spells over the girl, but Lukas says she’s resting comfortably, and the doc’s on her way.”
“No.” Ali barely kept from sobbing as she held onto Connor’s warm, limp hand. “Connor and Maks were thrown out the same window.” When Roz made a startled squeaking noise, Ali said, “Don’t ask. Just listen. The ambulance is on its way. I can’t move them. There are witnesses. I need your and Lukas’ help.” Her voice caught. “Roz, please. I don’t know what to do.”
“Ok.” She sounded rattled too, off balance. They both understood the consequences if Connor and Maks were identified as infecteds. “I’ll come to you first, and I’ll tell Lukas and the doc to meet us. Markus can babysit the girl. Where are you?”
“Corner of Thompson and Faraday,” she answered. “You’ll see the crowds.”
“Son of a bitch,” Roz groaned. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Ali tucked the phone away as the first ambulance arrived, followed closely by a police car. One benefit of having the police on the scene was they set up a barrier half a block in each direction and diverted traffic off Thompson. People still filmed from behind the barricades, but the space helped Ali relax a tiny bit. She was no longer in danger of glowing. In danger of kicking some of those frat boys’ asses—to be determined.
“You’re with these two?” the cop asked as the EMTs evaluated Connor and Maks.
Ali suspected if she tried to explain how three people had fallen from the same window, she’d only get herself in more trouble. “Uh. No. I was walking by when it happened.”
“We need you behind the barricade, miss,” the officer said, clearly annoyed. “We’re working here.”
“Sorry.” Snatching her bag tight to her chest, Ali concealed herself inside the crowd.
Ali scanned the buildings and lampposts up and down the street, looking for CCTV or security cameras that might tie her to the fall. She couldn’t save Connor and Maks if she was in police custody being questioned about her involvement. She didn’t notice any cameras, apart from the ones in the hands of tourists. Maybe she’d get lucky, they’d only share with their equally callous friends on social media, and none of it would go viral.
