DARK VENGEANCE, Part One

by Reinke, Sara

  He stopped at one of the outlined forms where a body had been. “Because there was a third victim. This one survived.”

  “Who?”

  “Kid named Téodoro Madera Ruiz. Téo for short. His old man was tight with Enrique Ramirez. His whole family is tied up in Los Guerreros. He witnessed the whole thing.”

  Squatting, he pointed to a slim metal rod protruding from the ground, probably three feet long end-to-end. Another one stuck out of the asphalt a few feet away, and nearby, she saw two other pairs likewise thrusting out of the pavement.

  “Steel rebars,” Elías said. “Used in construction for concrete reinforcement. These, however, were rammed them into the ground last night, through each of the victim’s hands, impaling them.”

  Lina’s eyes widened. “What?”

  Elías nodded grimly. “We had to cut their hands to remove the bodies. We’re still trying to figure out how to get these out of the concrete so we can collect them as evidence. They’re sunk about a foot, maybe a foot and a half deep, near as we can estimate.”

  “Holy shit,” Lina said.

  “See that tag?” Elías pointed to redirect her gaze to the sea wall nearby. Across the pale concrete slab, blood had been smeared in thick, grisly slashes, an oblong shape that looked oddly like a human index finger turned to the side, pointing in accusatory fashion. “That’s the Mayan symbol for one. It’s Tejano Cervantes’s personal marker. This is the first time I’ve seen it anywhere in this area, but I’ve been expecting it. Téo Ruiz hasn’t talked much, but what he’s said pretty much confirms it.” With a heavy sigh and a somewhat helpless expression, he looked at her. “Tejano’s here.”

  ****

  “You didn’t tell the media there was a survivor,” Lina observed as they got back into Elías’s car. They’d been approached by a swarm of reporters and cameras as they’d ducked back beneath the taped perimeter of the scene, and Lina had felt instantly anxious and alarmed, shying instinctively behind Elías and letting him defer the overlapping din of their questions with repeated, polite assertions of “No comment.”

  “No,” he agreed, shutting the driver’s side door and reaching for his seat belt. “I didn’t. I told you before, I do that sometimes if I think it’s going to help my investigation.”

  He keyed the ignition and dropped the Charger in gear, draping his hand across the back of her seat as he pivoted, looking out the back window as he pulled out in reverse.

  “We need to figure out where Tejano’s holing up,” he’d told her as they’d walked toward the car. “Our only hope is to bust him before anything else goes down—or anyone else gets hurt. I’ve got both state and federal warrants pending on his ass. If we can find him, we can book him, stop him before things escalate any further.”

  “How do we do that?” she’d asked, and he had shaken his head.

  “I’m hoping Téo Ruiz can give us a starting place on that,” he’d replied. “Tejano left him alive for a reason. He doesn’t do anything by accident—especially not leave a witness bleeding but breathing who could place him at a murder scene. No, Tejano let Téo live because he wants him to get a message to Valien. Our only hope is to intercept it somehow.”

  “Speaking of keeping things from the media…” Lina said carefully now in the car, again balancing the stack of case files in her lap. “I didn’t see anything in any of the reports I’ve been through so far about exsanguination.”

  “No?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Unless I’m overlooking it somehow.” But I don’t think I am, she thought. The case files to date were thick, and it would take her days, if not weeks, to go through everything, but the autopsy reports had been among the first documents she’d purposefully sought out and reviewed. The canal victims had all been dismembered, suffered blunt trauma and had evidence of gunshot wounds—but no mention had been made about the bodies being unnaturally drained of blood.

  For a moment, Elías sat there, the car running, his hand on the gear shift, poised but unmoving. Then with a sigh, he shoved the stick up into park, not drive, and turned to look at her. He’d taken off his jacket again before getting in the car, and when he reached for his neck, loosening the knot of his tie, she guessed maybe he felt awkward, too, or that the heat outside had gotten the best of him.

  “You’re not,” he said. “Overlooking it, I mean.”

  She didn’t know what to say, and sat uncomfortably still, the airconditioning buffeting her face, rustling her hair.

  “I killed Pepe Cervantes.”

  He offered this admittance so matter-of-factly, she couldn’t respond at first, couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly.

  “The other bodies from the canals, too. I shot them all.”

  “I…I don’t…” Lina stammered, blinking stupidly at him.

  “I want to show you something,” he said, unbuttoning the collar of his shirt. When he didn’t stop there, kept undoing the buttons at his sternum, then below, Lina’s eyes widened a bit, and she reached for the door handle.

  “Look, uh,” she began clumsily. “I think maybe we should just stop until you can call an attorney…”

  “Here.” Drawing aside the panels of his shirt, he exposed part of his torso. Admittedly, the view was very nice. He had a muscular chest, everything as taut and toned as she’d imagined when she’d seen him sparring with the punching bag earlier. This, however, didn’t change the fact that things had just gotten extremely tense and strange in the car, and all at once, Lina found herself wondering if she’d get to break in that new service pistol she wore strapped to her hip.

  Then Elías pointed to the side of his chest, his ribcage just beneath his left nipple and she realized.

  “Last month, Pepe Cervantes and some of his gang members broke into my condo,” he said, his voice quiet and somewhat hesitant, as if he was perfectly aware that what he was doing would seem odd to her, alarming even, and although ashamed of this, he was forcing himself to do it anyway. “They were waiting for me when I got home. They attacked me.”

  It hadn’t been her imagination, then, the peculiar scars she’d noticed earlier on his throat, his arms. In fact, he reached for his shirt cuffs, unbuttoning them now, turning them back toward his elbows. He held out his arms toward her, hands turned up, fists closed, and she could see the faint imprints of ragged wounds just beneath the delta of his thumbs, along each of his inner elbows, just beneath the curve of his bicep muscles.

  “They’re vampires,” he said and she looked up into his face, startled. Not that he’d said it, but that he knew—that another human knew, that she wasn’t alone with the tremendous, heavy secret.

  “So is Valien Cadana,” he continued, turning his head to show her his neck, the evidence that fangs had savagely torn into his pulse points, the carotids on either side. “Téo Ruiz, Lopito Olmos, Carlos Quesada—all of them. They dumped the bodies into the canals to cover up that I’d killed them. Because I did it to protect one of their own.”

  Oh, my God, Lina thought, because Brandon had been right—he’d been right all along, from the moment they’d arrived. And I didn’t believe him. I wouldn’t even listen to him.

  Elías reached for her, his fingers slipping into her hair, brushing it back from her shoulder. He touched her neck, or rather, the scars along her own throat that nearly matched his own, the ones her tumble of curls normally kept hidden from view.

  “Brandon Noble’s one, too, isn’t he?” he asked softly, the tip of his thumb lightly grazing the marks, making her shiver. “And there’s more where he came from. Is that why your brother brought him here? Are they allies with Valien? Are they on their way to help him?”

  With a frown, she shrugged away from him. “You’ve known the whole time,” she said. “So all of this…it’s been some kind of set up? Calling us in for questioning, following me around? Offering me the job? Not because I was a suspect, or because you thought I was a good cop, but because you want to pump me for information about—”
/>   “I never thought you were a suspect,” Elías cut in. “But I do think you were a good cop—I think you’re still a good cop, and that’s why I asked my chief to hire you. And I’m not ‘pumping’ you for information. I’m hoping you can help me.”

  His brows lifted, a pleading expression. “You know about what they are, what’s going on. You’re like me, Lina—you’re human, and you’re a cop. I need to talk to you, talk things through with you, figure out things together with you. Because you know about them, too. And you won’t think I’m crazy.”

  Helplessly, he stared at her. “I’m in over my head. Tejano’s in town, and I’m willing to bet he’s brought about a hundred, if not more, of his closest blood-sucking compadres with him. And it’s all my fault. If I don’t figure out how to fix it—and quick—then Valien Cadana and his gang—plus every human in Bayshore—are going to be caught in the middle of a goddamn vampire war. And Madre de Dios, that scares the shit out of me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Elías and Lina drove out to the Bayshore Community Medical Center, where Téo Ruiz had been delivered by ambulance earlier that morning. Like the two men who’d been found dead at the scene, Téo had been severely, savagely beaten. He’d been found pinned in an upright position to the seawall by another of the steel rebars; this one had been bent in a U to frame his neck, then punched through the concrete on either side of his face, trapping him in place. Now that Lina understood Tejano Cervantes was like Brandon—a Brethren, or in this case, a Nahual, as Elías had called them—she knew that he’d undoubtedly rammed the steel post into the wall by hand. Nothing Elías had told her so far indicated Tejano or the other Nahual fed from anyone but humans, which gave Lina some hope.

  Because that means they don’t have telekinetic powers like Brandon or the Morins.

  She’d never gone up against one of the psychokinetically endowed Brethren before, but she’d faced off against Brandon’s brother, Caine, before—twice, in fact—and had taken him out. Caine had only fed from humans and had lacked the mental powers that made the Morins—and anyone like them—such formidable adversaries.

  She didn’t tell Elías about this, not yet, anyway, because she’d spent much of the car ride across town from the crime scene to the hospital letting the day’s events and revelations sink in. For the first time since she’d walked into Jackson’s apartment months earlier and discovered Brandon naked in the bathroom, she didn’t feel like she was teetering on the edge of a keenly edged razor. She and Elías were in much the same place—each of them human, struggling to make sense of a world that had, to date, remained otherwise well-concealed from their kind. A world of vampires, she thought, remembering Elías’s admonition about the possibility of a war erupting between Valien Cadana’s Nahual gang and Tejano Cervantes’s. She had to admit, she shared his concerns. Because the idea scares the shit out of me, too.

  “Did your brother invite Brandon here to help?” Elías asked as he drove. “Are there more of them coming, these…Brethren, you said?”

  “No.” Lina shook her head. “I mean, yes, they call themselves Brethren, but more of them aren’t coming. At least, not that I know of. Jackson didn’t invite Brandon here. He came with me so I could see my mother. It was Brandon’s idea, in fact. Jackson had nothing to do with it. He doesn’t even know about Brandon or the Brethren.” When Elías glanced at her, brow arched in surprise, she frowned. “You mean he knows about the Nahual?”

  “Well, yeah,” Elías said, as if she’d just come to realize something that, to him, had been a long-standing, foregone conclusion. “He’s one of their feeders.”

  “Feeders?”

  “They’re a group of humans, maybe a dozen or so, the Nahual feed from. They’re close to the Nahual, friends with them even—as much a part of the corillo, or gang, as the Nahual members themselves. Some of the feeder relationships go back for generations, that’s what I’ve heard.”

  Jackie? she thought in stunned disbelief, fighting the urge to shake her head.

  “You mean he’s stumbled across—and befriended—two different vampires from two different species in his lifetime and didn’t realize it?” Elías asked, sounding as dubious about this as she felt about the notion of Jackie allowing himself to be an ongoing appetizer for a vampire clan.

  “Maybe he should play the lottery,” Lina remarked after a thoughtful pause, taking this ironic point into consideration.

  At the hospital, Elías parked the car and leaned across the cab, opening the glove compartment. “Hang on,” he murmured, as she moved to open her door. “I need to check my blood sugar real quick.” With a sideways glance in her direction, he added, “You’re not squeamish at the sight of blood, are you?”

  “Not at all.” She watched with undisguised curiosity as he pulled a small monitor and test kit from the glove box. It came in a small vinyl pouch he unzipped, spilling the contents into his lap.

  “Sorry about this,” he said, sounding embarrassed as he opened a little package of test strips and inserted one into the tail end of a small, hand-held device—a glucose monitor.

  “It’s alright.” Lina shook her head, fascinated.

  Using a small, pen-sized device, he pricked the side of his ring fingertip. With the pad of his thumb, he pushed against his knuckle, a gentle, kneading motion, and squeezed a drop of blood onto the test strip he’d loaded into the glucose monitor. The machine beeped, obviously meaning he’d applied enough blood, because he then popped his finger into his mouth and waited briefly until the machine showed him his results.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, putting the monitor back into the pouch. “Just time for some insulin, that’s all.”

  “You need me to step outside or something?”

  Elías laughed, then pivoted in his seat to reach for his jacket. “Up to you. It won’t take me a second, but if you’ve got a thing about needles, you might not want to watch.”

  He pulled out what appeared to be a thick ballpoint pen from an inner blazer pocket. It must have been some kind of portable insulin syringe, because when he pulled the plastic cap off, she caught a wink of light off a short, slim needle. Leaning back, he pulled his shirt tail from his pants just enough at his waistline to bare a small area of his stomach. He pinched himself lightly with his left hand, then, with his right, pushed the needle into his skin, quickly, efficiently, without as much as a wince.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Lina asked.

  “No.” He glanced at her with a smile as he tucked the remaining testing supplies unceremoniously back into the pouch. “I’ve been doing this since junior high. I’ve kind of gotten used to it.” He shoved the pack back into the glove box. “All done.”

  He stepped out of the Charger and leaned over the driver’s seat, reaching for his jacket in the back. After drawing it on, he paused for a moment, pulling his cell phone out and checking the screen, as if wanting to be sure he hadn’t missed any calls. Clearly he hadn’t, and this troubled with him; with a frown he shoved the phone back into his pocket.

  As they walked across the parking lot together, heading for the main entrance, Lina saw several motorcycles parked in a cluster together. One of them, a blue one, looked a lot like Jackson’s.

  “Valien’s here,” Elías remarked, following her gaze. “Some of his friends, too, it looks like. He’s not one much for traveling lightly, or alone. Sort of like Tejano.” Glancing at her, brow raised, he said, “I’ve posted a uniformed officer outside Téo’s room. Only hospital personnel are allowed in to see him. Valien and his crew are probably going to be pretty pissed about that, so let me handle it.” With a wink, he added, “They’re not too fond of me to begin with.”

  “Do they know you know about them?” she asked, and he chuckled with little humor.

  “Oh, yeah. And they’d just as soon I didn’t. Trust me.”

  “Why not?” Lina frowned, puzzled. “I thought you said they let humans like Jackie know the truth about t
hem.”

  “Like Jackie, yeah. Because he’s a feeder. I’m not.” Hooking his fingers into mock quote marks, he added, “My diabetes means I’m ‘defective,’ by their standards. Not fit for vampire consumption.”

  When they stepped off the elevator at the third floor lobby, they found Valien in the waiting area, surrounded by a close-knit circle of at least a dozen men and women. As he caught sight of Elías, Valien’s brows narrowed and he rose to his feet.

  “When can we see Téo?” he asked, striding forward, his hands closing into fists.

  “Not until I’ve taken his statement.” To his credit, Elías didn’t seem outwardly intimidated or fazed by Valien’s approach. Instead, he swept his eyes around the small gathering in the waiting room as if looking for someone.

  Valien grabbed him by the sleeve. “Pilar’s not here.”

  “Yeah?” Elías raised his brow. “Where is she, then? I had a message from her last night. She was crying, upset. You know anything about that?” When Valien didn’t immediately answer, Elías smirked, then shoved past him, walking away. “I figured as much.”

  At this, Lina drew back in surprise. Pilar? Pilar Cadana?

  She remembered Jackson telling her, Pilar’s been seeing a real prick. Valien’s wanting her to find someone more her type.

  Elías is Pilar’s boyfriend? she thought, stunned. Holy shit!

  Valien hooked his arm again, this time jerking hard enough to spin Elías in a clumsy semi-circle to face him. “Dr. Palance said Téo’s in and out consciousness,” he said. “His lung’s collapsed and he’s got bleeding in his brain. They just finished doing surgery to remove his spleen and part of his goddamn colon from where those bastard pendejos beat him so badly. He’s got a broken jaw, broken ribs, a fractured skull and he’s pissing blood by the pint.”

  Cutting his eyes back toward the waiting room, Valien seethed, “His mother and father are sitting right over there. They’ve been here for hours. You want to fuck with me, chota, that’s fine—here I am.” His expression shifted, growing pleading, nearly desperate. “But please. Let them see Téo.”